Room 45, a fact which
seems to show that the extent of municipal interference has been much
exaggerated.

The dressing-rooms were half on one side of the stage, half on the
other. Those on the side nearer to the stage-door were less unpleasant.
The architect evidently believed in the value of first impressions.
Anybody venturing into either warren without previous acquaintanceship
would have been bewildered by the innumerable rooms and passages, tucked
away in every corner and branching off in every direction. Some of the
former seemed to have been inhabited for years. One in particular
contained an ancient piano, two daguerrotypes and a heap of mouldering
stuffs. It might have been the cell where years ago a Ballerina was
immured for a wrong step. It existed like a monument to the despair of
ambition.

The Orient stifled young life. The _Corps de Ballet_ had the engulfing
character of conventual vows. When a girl joined it, she cut herself off
from the world. She went there fresh, her face a mist of roses, hope
burning in her heart, fame flickering before her eyes. In a few years
she would inevitably be pale with the atmosphere, with grinding work and
late hours. She would find it easy to buy spirits cheaply in the canteen
underneath the stage. She would stay in one line, it seemed, forever.
She would not dance for joy again.

When Jenny went to the Orient first, she did not intend to stay long.
She told the girls this, and they laughed at her. She did not know how
soon the heavy theater would become a habit; she did not realize what
comfort exists in the knowledge of being permanently employed. But not
even the Orient could throttle Jenny. She was not the daughter and
granddaughter of a ballet girl. She had inherited no traditions of
obedience. She never became a marionette to be dressed and undressed and
jigged, horribly and impersonally. She yielded up her ambition, but she
never lost her personality. When, soon after her arrival, the Maitre de
Ballet took her in his dark little corner and pinched her arm, she
struck him across the mouth, vowed she would tell the manager, and burnt
up his conceit with her spitfire eyes. He tried again later on, and
Jenny told his wife, a yellow-faced, fat Frenchwoman. Then he gave her
up, and, being an artist, bore her no malice, but kept her in the first
line of boys.

It is not to be supposed that the eighty or ninety ladies of the ballet
were unhappy. On the contrary, they w