that competition
frightened her!

[Illustration: THE BOY WITH THE GREEN EYES]

She had learned nothing new about Pa, except that the troupe still
existed, but in quite a small way, of course. Her Pa was in favor of soft
treatment, now, so they said; he had changed his manner. "Too late!"
murmured Lily thoughtfully; but she was much amused when she heard that
Tom, in addition to keeping up his trade as a shoeblack, was learning
boxing, with bulldog obstinacy, in order to give Pa back his blow on the
nose and beat him in a square fight. And didn't some one say that Tom was
stage-struck, too? Tom, that dwarf, with his short arms, on the stage!
Crazy! every one of them!

And then they were always talking of Jimmy: Jimmy here, Jimmy there. It
was becoming serious, Lily couldn't get over it. She wondered what old
Martello would say if he heard that: Jimmy an artiste! Pooh! Nonsense! And
it was true, mind you! It was repeated from mouth to mouth, his fame was
spreading, his fame, that is to say, in the bars, in the wings, among
pros; you heard his name mentioned together with a hundred others; but
that already was a great deal, that one could say, Butt Snyders, Laurence,
Jimmy, Marjutti, all mixed up, as though he were their equal, he who had
done nothing! But he would "do," it was in the air: some stroke of luck,
who could tell? And Lily knew him to be ambitious. Lady or no lady, she
was an artiste first and foremost and hated competition. She had been
whipped for her rivals, Lillian, Edith and Polly, had caught it for
Laurence and for the fat freaks, too, and she depended on her work for her
bread. When she saw a new troupe come to the front it made her anxious:
even children "that high," who played bike in between the pillars of the
stage, she felt inclined to stamp upon; and if people ever asked her
advice, she did not hesitate to tell them wrong. Men especially were
disastrous competitors, even the ignorant ones. You never knew where you
were with them, they dared do anything! She could not help getting mad
when she thought of it. One more to take the bread out of her mouth! For
it was all very well to treat him as a simpleton, to talk of his
crotchets--he had views concerning a stage-apprentices' fund, a home of
rest for superannuated artistes and so on--Lily considered him dangerous.
He was not a silly Glass-Eye or a stage-struck Tom; he was an ambitious
Jimmy. But all the same, how absurd! A hypocrite like that was f