d Glass-Eye to witness, went on telling of her
life in Berlin; how Jimmy had fallen in love with her when he saw her on
the stage, and he had the cheek to want her to run away with him; but who
got a box on the ear that day, eh? She perhaps: yes, rather, over the
left! And Jimmy and Trampy had fought for her! So had all the pros, worse
than dogs in September!

"What a rotten lot!" concluded Lily.

"My, how you've changed!" said Thea. "You used to be so fond of men."

"I give it them where they deserve," said Lily, slapping her firm, round
hips.

And they laughed noisily at Lily's anger when, with her shoulder drawn
back and her arm ready to strike, she spoke of breaking the jaws of those
two scoundrels.

"Go it! Hit me!" said Thea, putting forward her deltoid muscle. "Hit away!
You'll only smash your wrist!"

And then those Spartans calmed down, asked one another for news of absent
friends, talked about different people they had known, all over the place,
on the stage: their conversation always came round to the profession.
Lily, with greater refinement, sometimes tried to discuss dress: tulle
ruches were to be worn this year, she heard; feather boas. The Graces knew
nothing about that, stuck to their "Did you ever know...? Do you
remember...?" And every part of the world was mixed up in their talk:
India, Tasmania, Mexico, South Wales, New South Wales, York, New York,
Hampshire, New Hampshire.

"Did you know Ave Maria?" asked Lily.

"No."

But they mentioned other friends, like school-girls living in the same
quarter; only, for them, the school, the quarter was San Francisco,
Chicago, Berlin, and the schoolmates were the girl in a knot, who had sold
her skeleton in advance to the Medical College: Marjutti, the
double-knotted girl, to whom the South Kensington Museum offered five
hundred pounds for a cast of her figure; the Pawnees, who had just won a
treble beauty prize; and the Laurence girl, whose cruelly daring
performance was forbidden by the Manchester police; and heaps of others
whom they had known and who, at that moment, were asleep at the antipodes,
right under your feet, or waking up in the Far West, or going to bed in
the Far East, or pitching on the ocean, or rolling in express trains
toward the five corners of the earth. And their own traveling adventures,
the Graces' and Lily's: broken railway-bridges! ships on fire at sea!
towns blazing up in the night! ropes breaking, falls head-first, my! On