twilights
that were perceptibly earlier every day, Jenny began to realize how
everything of the past was falling to pieces. There was an epidemic of
matrimony at the theater, which included in the number of its victims
Maudie Chapman and Elsie Crauford. Of her other companions Lilli Vergoe
had left the ballet and taken up paid secretarial work for some
misanthropic society, while the relations between Irene and herself had
been as grimly frigid ever since the quarrel. New girls seemed to occupy
old places very conspicuously, and all the stability of existence was
shaken by change. Only the Orient itself remained immutably vast and
austere, voracious of young life, sternly intolerant of fading beauty,
antique and unscrupulous.

Jenny was becoming conscious of the wire from which she was suspended
for the world's gaze, jigged hither and thither and sometimes allowed to
fall with a flop when fate desired a new toy. The ennui of life was
overwhelming. A gigantic futility clouded her point of view, making
effort, enjoyment, sorrow, disappointment, success equally unimportant.
She was not induced by that single experience of St. Valentine's night
to prosecute her curiosity. This may have been because passion full-fed
was a disillusionment, or it may have been that the shock of her
mother's madness appeared to her as a tangible retribution. Everything
was dead. Her dancing, like her life, had become automatic, and even her
clothes lasted twice as long as in the old days.

"I can't make out what's happened to everybody," she said to May. "No
fellows ever seem to come round the stage door now. All the girls have
either got married or booked up that way. Nobody ever wants to have
larks like we used to have. You never hardly hear anybody laugh in the
dressing-room now. I met someone the other day who knew me two years ago
and they said I'd gone as thin as a threepenny-bit."

Jenny meditated upon the achievement of her life up to date and wrote it
down a failure. Where was that Prima Ballerina Assoluta who with
pitter-pat of silver shoes had danced like a will-o'-the-wisp before her
imagination long ago? Where was that Prima Ballerina with double-fronted
house at Ealing or Wimbledon, and meek, adoring husband? Where, indeed,
were all elfin promises of fame and fairy hopes of youth? They had fled,
those rainbow-winged deceivers, together with short frocks
accordion-pleated and childhood's tumbled hair. Where was that love so
vio