... the divorce depended on the husband ... and the husband
wouldn't have it ... at any price: not for a million, he said, by Jove,
would he be separated from a little wife whom he adored!

"Poor Lily!" thought Jimmy sadly. "Will she always be doomed to drag that
dead weight about with her?"

During the intervals for rest, while Lily wiped the perspiration from her
forehead, Jimmy talked to her ... at first, of insignificant things ...
the name "Astrarium," for instance ... a place devoted to planets, to
stars: as a palmarium is to palms. Stars ... that was to say,
bill-toppers: the Three Graces; the Laurences; the Lillians; the
Marjuttis; the Lilies ... yes, the Lilies! Then he pitied her for
belonging to Trampy; and what a good little Lily she would have been if
she had remained with her family!

"But I _am_ a good little Lily!" she said, with a display of childish
vehemence. "What more do you want? We artistes do what we jolly well
please, and we don't care a damn for the rest!" And she had half a mind to
tell him that it was all his fault! "I had to do a silly thing and I did
it," she continued, with an expression of regret on her face. "I married
without love, but lovers, my! I've had, I may say, as many as I wanted ...
from the son of a lord down."

And Lily, to excite him, told him the long array of her love affairs, as
it was told everywhere, on the Bill and Boom Tour, on the Harrasford, on
the Eastern and Western Tours, like the whippings and the rest.

"Yes, I know," replied Jimmy, very coldly.

"What, you don't believe me!" exclaimed Lily. "There were men who would
have left wife and child for me! ... heaps of lovers, tons of them!"

"My poor Lily, having so many is the same as having none at all," added
Jimmy dreamily.

But still he did not declare his love: besides, he had constantly to leave
her, to go and give orders, or climb up on the roof, or look at the
heating-apparatus, below.

Lily watched him go, followed him with a sphinx-like glance, while a vague
smile flickered about her lips....

But she hardly had time to think of all this: the assistants replaced the
bird in its cage, locked the door, opened that leading to the
dressing-room passage and the artistes arrived and took up their places on
their carpets.

Lily had seen it a hundred times, a thousand times, "millions of times!"
She never wearied of it. She spent the day there, among the groups of
bloomers: the Three Graces, bare-arm