: stars "that big." And storms: waves "miles high!"
And successes at Gangpur; and in Chicago, where she shared a dressing-room
with three girls who, when they were undressed, were all over muscles,
just like men. She liked the bike well enough, but those falls: oh, damn
it!

"That little monkey has seen everything in her time," thought Jimmy, the
electrician.

And he mused upon the numberless things which she had seen, the countries,
the cities, and all that she would yet see, in her life as a wandering
star, while he would remain walled up in his cabin, with his nose to the
switchboard.

And the steamer sped--thud, thud, thud--over the dark sea, where the noise
of the waves sounded like the roar of multitudes of men. Huge clouds in
the east were tinged with red, as though London were about to loom above
the horizon in all its glory, filling the vast expanse with its rumors and
its lights....

CURTAIN RISES

I

"Lily ... who's Lily? A New Zealander: really? Ah well, we will look into
the matter; it will be settled later on ..."

Clifton, when he returned home that evening, gnawed his mustache and
clenched his fists with rage. Ah, he would not soon forget his arrival in
London! To get there and be chucked! Was that what he had come from New
York for? To see Lily's place at the Castle filled by another troupe of
the Hauptmanns--the Hauptmanns again, those fat freaks!--and nothing to be
said or done?

"Engagement not valid. Ought at least to have waited for the London
agency's signed contract before leaving!"

Intent upon his vexations of the moment, he described his day to Mrs.
Clifton. What had staggered him, done for him, was his visit to the agent,
where they hadn't seemed to know Lily!

He had rushed at once to others, just to show them who Miss Lily was! But
he got the same reply wherever he went:

"Lily? Who's Lily? A Maori? Let's see the photograph."

And would Mrs. Clifton ever believe, asked the indignant Pa, what they
said when they handed him back the photograph? Yes, to him, the father, to
his face, they said:

"She's too thin, that Lily of yours!" "If that's the way they welcome
British subjects returning to the mother-country, it's jolly encouraging,
on my word it is!" concluded Clifton.

Ma, among the open boxes, listened and said nothing; she was exasperated.
Their entry into the metropolis struck her, too, as anything but
triumphal. For all her dislike of those breakneck trades,