red,
among so many different things. She had seen everything and done
everything. Once, during a week when she was "resting," she had helped her
landlady, who kept a public-house, to draw the beer and had waited on the
customers, with her fifty-pound diamond brooch at her throat.

At a benefit performance, one night, when they were drinking champagne on
the stage, actors, singers, artistes, all together, her pink tights had
excited the dress-coats. Lily had been "pressed in company," that is to
say, surrounded till she did not know which way to turn, while her time
was pretty well taken up with saying, "Paws off!" before, behind, on every
side. She had triumphed at galas, above a tumult of heads and parasols: at
Roundhay Park, among other places, beneath the motto, "Let Leeds
flourish!" Feeling anxious about her future, she had consulted a "Zanzig"
at Earl's Court. Each week brought its surprises, its fresh knowledge.
Lily learned something every day: "If you see a lamb in the fields with
its head turned toward you, that's lucky; if you see its tail first, it's
a sign of bad luck," and the way of holding your hands, of placing your
fingers, of whispering certain words in certain circumstances.

She collected halfpennies with holes in them. In Ireland, she had kissed
the Blarney stone and picked shamrock in the ruins. She had lost her
little mother-of-pearl hunchback in the labyrinth of underground passages
at the Blackpool Tower Circus. The loss of this lucky charm had damped her
spirits for a week. And her profits were small and her "exes" constantly
increasing: tips to the call-boy, who cleaned her bike; tips to the
stage-manager; half-crowns and five shillings in every direction. As soon
as she had put a trifle by, a week without an engagement made her hard-up
again. Though she traveled at reduced fares and contented herself with a
ham sandwich or a slice of pork-pie on the road, she would never, never be
able to repay Jimmy that money: she had not even paid Glass-Eye yet! Her
dresses for on and off the stage swallowed up everything. And yet she
couldn't go about naked, like Lady Godiva!

And time passed and passed. Lily was growing _old_: she was eighteen!
There were girls of her age who were already beyond work, used up, like
that girl contortionist who had just been cut open for a tumor; and Lily
had as yet achieved nothing! Oh, she ought to have signed for America or
Australia, or else for Russia, of which she h