atch in hand, on the
stage.

"Couldn't you cut that little trick? You know the one I mean," said the
manager.

He called a little trick a performance which it had cost her eighteen
months' hard practice and no end of bruises to learn. Lily did not wait to
be asked twice. She cut as desired and thought it a jolly lot easier to
trot round quietly, as though out for a ride, with pretty smiles to the
audience. She ended by paying more attention to her dresses than to her
work:

"It's not so much what one does," she said, "as the way one does it."

The sympathy with which she was surrounded unmanned the Spartan in her.
She strove to please, no longer gave her performance for herself, like a
machine, unerring and exact. Already in a few months, she was spoiled. She
looked for adventitious successes. She said, "The audience is very cold at
Birmingham," because she was not asked out to supper, and, "They do like
artistes at Sheffield, gee!" because a gentleman had sent her champagne
and flowers in her dressing-room.

In the towns where she played three times a day--a matinee and two night
turns--she gave half of her performance, cut whatever was dangerous or
tiring. She never practised now; just went down in the morning to fetch
her letters at the theater, where she loved receiving them, post-cards
especially, which any one could read. She said to the jossers:

"Send me lots; talk about motor-cars and champagne suppers: that drives
the pros wild."

She left them lying on the table, or else walked about on the stage, with
her letters in her hand, like a lady overwhelmed with offers, with
invitations. If, by any chance, she went to the practice at the end of the
week, it was to display her hat, her new boots; and she laughed to herself
when she saw the artistes, each on his carpet, fagging away like mad. She
felt like a fine lady visiting a boarding-school, among those little girls
practising their flip-flaps or gluing themselves to the wall to try their
back-bendings. The pride of a Marjutti, who, they said, tortured her
spinal column to achieve a double knot; the inordinate ambition of a
Laurence, risking her life for the pleasure of risking it, were things
which she did not understand. And then, all those accidents! Dolly Pawnee,
the other day, had broken her arm at the New York Hippodrome; the Gilson
girl had fallen on her head at Budapest. They were mad, thought Lily, to
do all that without being obliged to! No, no;