nd she drew
herself up proudly, like a lady who had a sense of her responsibilities. A
new life was opening before Lily, as before a girl just coming out. Poor
Lily, a girl still, in her way, yes, with, for her portion, a feather in
her hat, a gollywog in her trunk, a pair of supple legs and nerves of
steel, unerring and exact, trained to turn round and round....

CHAPTER II

"Liverpool! Come along, Glass-Eye!" said Lily, jogging her maid in the
ribs.

Glass-Eye, half asleep, clumsily gathered up her parcels, while Lily
looked round for the baggage-man. On the platform was an avalanche of
bags, boxes, picture-frames, as at the departure from Euston; the basket
trunks were being piled up in the theater-vans. Lily pointed out her
hamper and her bike to the boy from the theater, who had come to meet the
"program" at the station.

"Are you the bicyclist?"

"I am," replied Lily modestly.

She gave her address: not the pros' boarding-house, but private "digs"
which had been recommended to her in London, with a note of introduction.
Then she walked out of the station, followed by Glass-Eye.

Lily knew Liverpool, vaguely, as she knew all the towns of the United
Kingdom and those of America, too, and Australia and India and Germany and
Holland and elsewhere. They were all muddled up in her memory, she had
seen so many, and made as it were one great city, but for occasional
salient points, as in the towns which you came to in a boat, or those in
which you had a circus parade, or others still, here and there: Glasgow,
where she had fallen and broken a tooth; Blackpool with its ball-rooms,
its tower and a "contract!" Sheffield, with its smoking chimneys;
Washington, with a dome at the end; New York, with its sky-scrapers. The
towns of her early childhood, leaning against mountains, buried under
trees, were more remote, more like a dream. Elephants, monkeys, harnessed
buffaloes; and then Mexico and Ave Maria, London and those footy rotters!

Liverpool was Lime Street: Lily remembered a sort of round church; when
you got to that, you turned to the left. She soon found the house and
received from a huge, full-blown lady the friendly welcome which Lily's
artless air and fair curls always insured her. No gentleman with them? All
alone by themselves? A room with a big double bed, a little parlor with a
bow-window; sixteen shillings a week, including the use of the kitchen.
Just then, the baggage-man arrived, took the tru