A youth in a very shabby tweed suit came on to the platform. He sat down at the piano, and rattled the introduction to the well-known music hall song entitled My Little Baby Boy. On bounced the golden-haired brunette. She wore a skirt to the knees, and had made up her face as if for the glare of a theatre. Her appearance lowered the concert to the level of a penny gaff. Several women of the shop-keeping class, hitherto sympathetic, murmured "Oh!" and tightened their mouths.
"Isn't the costume a mistake?" whispered Conrad.
"Do you think so? How would you have dressed her?"
"Well," said Conrad, "a long frock."
"Mm. What sort of frock?"
"Well, I should have made her look quiet, and very—er——"
"Respectable. I know! ... Go on."
"I should have said, 'Be pale, and pathetic!'
"That's right, I wanted them to; but they've all got themselves up wrong, except my friend Miss Lascelles. Sh!"
The vocalist's blackened eyelids drooped to the paper that she held;—