“Yes,” I says, “some women have.”
“Ah,” he says, “but ’er voice is the sort of voice yer want to listen to.”
“Oh,” I says, “that’s its speciality, is it?”
“That’s it, sonny,” he replies.
She came in a little later. I’d a’ known her anywhere for her eyes, and her red hair, in spite of her being that clean you might have eaten your dinner out of her
hand. And as for her clothes! Well, I’ve mixed a good deal with the toffs in my time, and I’ve seen duchesses dressed more showily and maybe more expensively, but her clothes seemed to be just a framework to show her up. She was a beauty, you can take it from me; and it’s not to be wondered that the La-De-Das were round her when they did see her, like flies round an open jam tart.
Before three months were up she was the rage of London—leastways of the music-hall part of it—with her portrait in all the shop windows, and interviews with her in half the newspapers. It seems she was the daughter of an officer who had died in India when she was a baby, and the niece of a bishop somewhere in Australia. He was dead too. There didn’t seem to be any of her ancestry
as wasn’t dead, but they had all been swells. She had been educated privately, she had, by a relative; and had early displayed an aptitude for dancing, though her friends at first had much opposed her going upon the stage. There was a lot more of it—you know the sort of thing. Of course, she was a connection of one of our best known judges—they all are—and she merely acted in order to support a grandmother, or an invalid sister, I forget which. A wonderful talent for swallowing, these newspaper chaps has, some of ’em!
“Kipper” never touched a penny of her money, but if he had been her agent at twenty-five per cent. he couldn’t have worked harder, and he just kept up the hum about her, till if you didn’t want to hear anything more about Caroline Trevelyan, your only chance would have
been to lie in bed, and never look at a newspaper. It was Caroline Trevelyan at Home, Caroline Trevelyan at Brighton, Caroline Trevelyan and the Shah of Persia, Caroline Trevelyan and the Old Apple-woman. When it wasn’t Caroline Trevelyan herself it would be Caroline Trevelyan’s dog as would be doing something out of the common, getting himself lost or summoned or drowned—it didn’t matter much what.