“The gentlemen had left me alone on the stage with five or six footlights—which they ought to call face-lights—flashing in my eyes, and when the pianist began to vamp and I to sing it was like pitching my voice into a tunnel, and I became so dreadfully nervous that I was forced to laugh. That seemed to vex my unseen audience, who thought me 'rot'; so I said, 'Let there be more light then.' and there was more light, 'and let the piano cease from troubling,' and it was so. Then I just stiffened my back and gave them one of mother's French songs, and after the first verse I called out to the manager at the back,” Can you hear me?' and he called back, 'Go on; it's splendid!' So I did 'Mylecharaine' in the Manx, and I suppose I acted both of my songs; but I was only beginning to be aware that my voice in that great place was a little less like a barrel-organ than usual when suddenly there came a terrific clatter, such as comes with the seventh wave on the shingle, and my two dear men in the dark were clapping the skin of their hands off!
“Oh, my dears! my dears! If you only knew how for weeks and weeks I had been moaning and lamenting that it was because I wasn't clever that people took no notice of me, you would forgive a vain creature when she said to herself, 'My daughter, you are really somebody, after all—you, you, you!' It was a beautiful moment, though, and when the old mushroom came back to the stage saying: 'What a voice! What expression! What nature!' I felt like falling on his bald head and kissing it, not being able to speak for lumps in the throat and feeling like the Methodist lady who poured out whisky for the class leaders after they had presented her with a watch, and then told the reporters to say she had suitably responded.
“Heigho! I have talked about the fashionable people I meet in London, but I don't want to be one of them. They do nothing but rush about, dress, gossip, laugh, love, and plunge into all the delights of life. That is not my idea of existence. I am ambitious. I want to do something. I am tired in my soul of doing nothing. Yes, it has been that all along, though I didn't like to tell you so before. There are people who are born in the midst of greatness and they don't know how to use it. But to be one of the world's celebrities, that is so different! To have won the heart of the world, so that the world knows you and thinks of you and loves you! Say it is by your voice you do it and that your world is the concert hall, or even the music hall—what matter? You needn't live music hall, whatever the life inside of it. And then that great dark void peopled with faces; that laugh or cry just as you please to make them—confess; that it would be magnificent, my dear ones!
“I am to go again to-night to hear what Mr. Sefton has to propose, but already this dingy little bedroom smiles upon me, and even the broken tiles in the backyard might be the pavement of paradise! If it is true what he tells me—-Well, he that hath the bride is the bridegroom, and if my doings hereafter don't make your hair curl I will try to show the inhabitants of this stupid old earth what a woman can do in spite of every disadvantage. I shall not be sorry to leave this place either. The rats in these old London houses (judging by their cries of woe) hold a nightly carnival for the eating up of the younger members of the family. And then Mrs. Jupe and Mr. Jupe—Mr. Dupe I call him—she deceives him so dreadfully with her gadding about——But anon, anon, good people!
“It is New Year's Eve to-day, and nearly nine months since I came up to London. Tempus fugit! In fact tempus is fugit-ing most fearfully, considering that I am twenty-one on Sunday next, you know, and that I haven't begun to do anything really. The snowdrops must be making a peep at Glenfaba by this time, and Aunt Rachel will be cutting slips of the rose trees and putting them in pots. Yandher place must he urromassy [* Out of mercy.] nice though, with snow on the roof and the sloping lawn, and the windows glistening with frost—just like a girl in her confirmation veil as she stands hack to look at herself in the glass. I intend to see the New Year in this time on the outside of St. Paul's Cathedral, where people congregate in thousands as twelve o'clock approaches to carry on the beautiful fiction that there is still only one clock in London, and they have to hold their noses in the air to watch for the moment when it is going to strike. But in the midst of the light and life of this splendid city I know my heart will go back with a tender twinge to the little dark streets on the edge of the sea, where the Methodist choirs will be singing, 'Hail, smiling morn,' preparatory to coffee and currant cake.
“Who will be your 'first foot' this year, I wonder? It was John Storm last year, you remember, and being as dark as a gipsy, he made a perfect qualtagh. [* Manx for “first foot.”] And how we laughed when, disguised in the snow that was falling at the time, he pretended to be a beggar and came in just as grandfather was reading the bit about the Good Shepherd, and how he loved his lambs—and then I found him out! Ah me!
“I am looking perfectly dazzling in a new hat to-day, having been going about hitherto in one of those little frights that used to be cocked up on the top of your hair like a hen on a cornstack. But now I am carrying about the Prince of Wales's feathers, and if he could only see me himself in them!——
“You see what a scatter-brained creature I am! Leaving the hospital has made me grow so much younger every day that I am almost afraid I may come to contemplate short frocks. But really it's the first time I've looked nice for an eternity, and now I entirely retract and repent me of all I said about wishing to be a man. Being a girl, I'll put up with it, and if all the old mushroom says on that head also is true—— But then men are such funny things, bless them! Glory.
“P.S.—No word from John Storm yet. Apparently he never thinks of us now—of me at all events—and I suppose he has resigned himself and taken the vows. That's one kind of religion, I dare say, but I can't understand it; and I don't know how a dog, even, can be nailed up to a wall and not go mad. In the night lying in bed I sometimes think of him. A dark cell, a bench for a bed, a crucifix, and no other furniture, praying with trembling limbs and chattering teeth—No; such things are too high for me; I can not reach to them.
“It seems impossible that he can be in London too. What a place this London is! Such a mixture! Fashion, religion, gaiety, devotion, pride, depravity, wealth, poverty! I find that for a girl to succeed in London her moral colour must be heightened a little. Pinjane [* Manx dish, like Devonshire junket] alone won't do. Give her a slush of pissaves [* Preserves] and she'll go down sweeter. Angels are not wanted here at all. The only angels there are in London are kept framed in the church windows, and I half suspect that even they were women once, and liked bread and butter. And then Nell Gwynne's flag floats from the steeple of St. Martin's in the Fields, and now and again they ring the bells for her!”