“What a fool!” thought Lily. “Fancies himself an artiste because he used to mend my bike for me!”
Jimmy, it seemed, had hired a huge shed and there, all alone, fitted up some apparatus of a complicated kind. He never went out by day. He worked and worked. A trick to break your neck at, it appeared, or make your fortune.
“Those jossers!” exclaimed Lily scornfully.
And what was he going to do on his bike? Nobody knew. There was something published in the papers, they said. It was something on the back-wheel.
“What rot!”
Lily laughed open-mouthed, laughed with all her muscles, twisting her hips, splitting her sides, smacking her thighs. What! Jimmy on the back-wheel! He! He! He cutting twirls, that josser!
“And the troupe?”
The troupe nobody knew about: dispersed, most likely; the troupe, after all, was Lily. When she went, everything was bound to fall to pieces. Pa didn’t care either; told any one who would listen to him that he was going to retire to Kennington, that he was well off now ... thousands of pounds in the bank ... made his fortune ... meant to live on his dividends.
“I knew it,” said Lily; “I knew I had made his fortune! Thousands of pounds, damn it!”
“Lily, don’t swear like that!” said Nunkie Fuchs. “It’s not right!”