“What a rotten lot!” concluded Lily.
“My, how you’ve changed!” said Thea. “You used to be so fond of men.”
“I give it them where they deserve,” said Lily, slapping her firm, round hips.
And they laughed noisily at Lily’s anger when, with her shoulder drawn back and her arm ready to strike, she spoke of breaking the jaws of those two scoundrels.
“Go it! Hit me!” said Thea, putting forward her deltoid muscle. “Hit away! You’ll only smash your wrist!”
And then those Spartans calmed down, asked one another for news of absent friends, talked about different people they had known, all over the place, on the stage: their conversation always came round to the profession. Lily, with greater refinement, sometimes tried to discuss dress: tulle ruches were to be worn this year, she heard; feather boas. The Graces knew nothing about that, stuck to their “Did you ever know...? Do you remember...?” And every part of the world was mixed up in their talk: India, Tasmania, Mexico, South Wales, New South Wales, York, New York, Hampshire, New Hampshire.
“Did you know Ave Maria?” asked Lily.
“No.”
But they mentioned other friends, like school-girls living in the same quarter; only, for them, the school, the quarter was San Francisco, Chicago, Berlin, and the schoolmates were the girl in a knot, who had sold her skeleton in advance to the Medical College: Marjutti, the double-knotted girl, to whom the South Kensington Museum offered five hundred pounds for a cast of her figure; the Pawnees, who had just won a treble beauty prize; and the Laurence girl, whose cruelly daring performance was forbidden by the Manchester police; and heaps of others whom they had known and who, at that moment, were asleep at the antipodes, right under your feet, or waking up in the Far West, or going to bed in the Far East, or pitching on the ocean, or rolling in express trains toward the five corners of the earth. And their own traveling adventures, the Graces’ and Lily’s: broken railway-bridges! ships on fire at sea! towns blazing up in the night! ropes breaking, falls head-first, my! One would have thought that these girls of seventeen to twenty were South Sea pirates, talking of hangings and tortures, or, rather, children playing at frightening one another. Lily, for instance, in India: two eyes glaring at her in the dark, gee! And, in New York, a fall into a mirror; all over blood; half dead. She grew excited, in her desire to outdo Laurence and Crack-o’-Whip: the steel-buckled belt, the kicks in the ribs! Stories of brutal treatment picked up on every side—from the Gilson girl, from Ave Maria, from all the boys and all the girls and all the monkeys who had been through the mill—she made every one of them her own, served them up hot and hot to the astounded Graces, talked of whole days spent in practising on rough, uneven boards—“And given no food, was I, Glass-Eye?”—so much so that she would sometimes get up in the night and go and pick up the crusts under the table, gee! Lily reveled in the pitying expressions of the Three Graces and her heart swelled with pride when Thea, greatly touched, remarked that, in such cases, it would have been better not to be born.
“You’re quite right,” said Lily, with a drooping air; but she burst into a peal of fresh, young laughter when she saw Glass-Eye overcome with emotion. “What’s that?” asked Lily, giving her a thump in the ribs. “Crying? You silly cuckoo!”