t them suggested faces seen in Piccadilly at night or in
the Burlington Arcade.

Lily sent in her card, threw a short-sighted glance around her and
remained standing, like a lady who is never kept waiting and who is sure
to be received at once. And, with her head bent down and her chin in her
gold-spotted tie, she turned over the pages of _Le Courrier des Cafes
Concerts_ on the table ... names which she didn't know ... the small
"numbers" of the continent ... so much the better ... all the more chance
for her. But the engagement which she dreamed of did not offer this time
either. What the agent did propose to her, almost without lowering his
voice, with the door open, before everybody, was the grated private boxes
of South America ... the private rooms of Russia ... accompanied, at a
startled movement on Lily's part, by this concession:

"You needn't sleep there, you know!"

To talk like that to a lady! Lily felt stifled. Was that what she had
learned the bike for? To exhibit herself after the show, at the customers'
disposal? Lily could have fainted on the stairs, as she went down.

"One of those!" she said. "Not I!"

And she continued her weary pilgrimage of stairs, from agent to agent.

"I must have six months filled up in my book before to-night!" she said,
determined to visit them all, small and large, rather than go back
empty-handed.

There were some who suggested to her that ten per cent. was really very
little....

"I like their style!" thought Lily. "They want an extra sop thrown to
them: one might as well work for nothing!"

She thanked them, nevertheless, so as not to make enemies of them--one
never knows--and the agent doesn't matter so much; but the assistant, who
happens to have known you when you were "that high" ... better give him a
tip, lest he should round on you.

She also saw a former artiste, a friend of Pa's, who had become an agent.

"Miss Lily? Lily Clifton? What are you doing now? Won't you see my
secretary? Leave your address with him."

"Fellows whom Pa helped!" she grumbled angrily, as she went down the
stairs. "They're the worst of all! They make you pay for the humiliation
of their own failure on the stage!"

Presently, she came to an agent who practised almost in the street, in an
arcade somewhat like the Burlington, an agent for everything ... circus,
music-hall, theater ... artistes formed in a week ... white flesh at
famine salaries. There were all sorts of people ther