And her Ma had prophesied to her that, one day, she would be worse off than they! No, she would never be half so badly off! Why, she could have had anything she wanted, motor-cars, Paris gowns, for the asking.
THE PARA-PARAS
“Glass-Eye, my bag!” And, handing a small gold coin to the wretched couple, “There ... between artistes, you know ... give it back when you can; good-by. Did you notice, Glass-Eye,” asked Lily, as she walked away, “how flattered they were when I said, ‘Between artistes?’ They looked quite touched.”
But there was no time to waste in nonsense, on a day when she was calling on the agents. The thing was to get there first; and Lily consulted her addresses....
She was exasperated at being obliged, with her talent, to climb all those stairs, to hang about in the waiting-room, she, Lily Clifton! And it reeked of vice, stunk with the trashy scent of the “not-up-to-muches:” merely to look at them suggested faces seen in Piccadilly at night or in the Burlington Arcade.
Lily sent in her card, threw a short-sighted glance around her and remained standing, like a lady who is never kept waiting and who is sure to be received at once. And, with her head bent down and her chin in her gold-spotted tie, she turned over the pages of Le Courrier des Cafés Concerts on the table ... names which she didn’t know ... the small “numbers” of the continent ... so much the better ... all the more chance for her. But the engagement which she dreamed of did not offer this time either. What the agent did propose to her, almost without lowering his voice, with the door open, before everybody, was the grated private boxes of South America ... the private rooms of Russia ... accompanied, at a startled movement on Lily’s part, by this concession:
“You needn’t sleep there, you know!”
To talk like that to a lady! Lily felt stifled. Was that what she had learned the bike for? To exhibit herself after the show, at the customers’ disposal? Lily could have fainted on the stairs, as she went down.
“One of those!” she said. “Not I!”