“But I am a good little Lily!” she said, with a display of childish vehemence. “What more do you want? We artistes do what we jolly well please, and we don’t care a damn for the rest!” And she had half a mind to tell him that it was all his fault! “I had to do a silly thing and I did it,” she continued, with an expression of regret on her face. “I married without love, but lovers, my! I’ve had, I may say, as many as I wanted ... from the son of a lord down.”
And Lily, to excite him, told him the long array of her love affairs, as it was told everywhere, on the Bill and Boom Tour, on the Harrasford, on the Eastern and Western Tours, like the whippings and the rest.
“Yes, I know,” replied Jimmy, very coldly.
“What, you don’t believe me!” exclaimed Lily. “There were men who would have left wife and child for me! ... heaps of lovers, tons of them!”
“My poor Lily, having so many is the same as having none at all,” added Jimmy dreamily.
But still he did not declare his love: besides, he had constantly to leave her, to go and give orders, or climb up on the roof, or look at the heating-apparatus, below.
Lily watched him go, followed him with a sphinx-like glance, while a vague smile flickered about her lips....
But she hardly had time to think of all this: the assistants replaced the bird in its cage, locked the door, opened that leading to the dressing-room passage and the artistes arrived and took up their places on their carpets.
Lily had seen it a hundred times, a thousand times, “millions of times!” She never wearied of it. She spent the day there, among the groups of bloomers: the Three Graces, bare-armed, went to work, practised the human cluster; Nunkie kept an eye on his dear nieces and rehearsed the Bambinis, now that old Martello was keeping his room for good. Lily, who was almost reduced to eating dry bread, but who remained the fine lady nevertheless, brought them bags of sweets. Calmed by her work, she sat down in a corner, laughed, her head thrown back, full-throated, applauded the others with her thumbnail, shook hands with new-comers, made herself liked by all. And it was:
“Hullo, girls! Hullo, boys! Dear old Blackpool! What’s the news at the Palace? Who’s topping the bill at the Hippodrome?”