e thought that
she had gone off. Lily was furious: if, on those evenings, she missed a
trick, she would knock Glass-Eye about when she returned to the wings,
storm at the stage--"Slippery as ice, damn it!"--fling her bike, which was
not to blame, against the wall. Lily, in her pink tights, under the
pendants of false pearls on her forehead, looked like an angry savage,
ready to fly at your throat.

That was her life. No adventures, really; theaters in which she caught on,
theaters in which she didn't go down so well; more or less prolonged
applause; an encore or two; and, here and there, a bouquet large enough to
fill a cab: those were the great events. And it was always the same show,
on the same stage, from one end of England to the other; theaters and
theaters; so many theaters that, in her memory, they ended, like the
towns, by making only one. It was always herds of Roofers, swaying in
unison, with flaxen wigs, scarlet legs, boyish voices; and "families,"
"sisters," "brothers," all different, but all alike, going up the
staircase to their dressing-rooms in wraps, like gouty people at a spa,
and serios, serios, with choruses emphasized by dances. Sometimes, a new
attraction, a Venus without tights, or a bare-breasted Salome, would draw
whole groups, boys and girls mixed, to the wings, with their necks
stretched toward the stage. And there were exotic features, too: conjurers
from Malabar; boomerang-throwing bush-men; the Light of Asia, a Chinese
girl without arms, an artificial product, like those beggar-monsters whom
they cultivate in pots in the mountains of Navarre. She saw the
boy-violinist again. Since that bite in the seat of his trousers, at
Budapest, he had abandoned all hope of fame and was looking for an
engagement in the orchestra. She saw the female-impersonator with the
green eyes. She saw numbers and numbers. She ended by seeing them all
again, in the various greenrooms. She heard names mentioned. People were
coming on all round: Tom, singing-girls, dancing-girls. She would have to
do something, too, after all, to get herself talked about! She had
received a shock on opening _The Era_: they had not taken out her name!
There was still a Miss Lily at Rathbone Place: her cousin Daisy, it
appeared, a stranger, was there in her stead, under her name! And they
were stealing her idea! The New Zealanders were now called the New
Trickers; no doubt the turn which she had described to Pa. Something new,
something