s true.

'No,' I said hastily. 'It is many years since I have been in England,
even. Do they know down there who Qita is?'

'Not they!' he replied.

I grew reflective. Stars such as I have no place of origin. We shoot up
out of a void, and sink back into a void. I had forgotten Bursley and
Bursley folk. Recollections rushed in upon me.... I felt beautifully
sad. I drew off my gloves, and flung my hat on a chair with a movement
that would have bewitched a man of the world, but Mr. George Capey was
unimpressed. I laughed.

'What's the joke?' he inquired. I adored him for his Bursliness.

'I was just thinking, of fat Mrs. Cartledge, who used to keep that
fishmonger's shop in Oldcastle Street, opposite Bates's. I wonder if
she's still there?'

'She is,' he said. 'And fatter than ever! She's getting on in years
now.'

I broke the rule of a lifetime, and let him interview me.

'Tell them I'm thirty-seven,' I said. 'Yes, I mean it. Tell them.'

And then for another tit-bit I explained to him how I had discovered
Sally at Koster and Bial's, in New York, five years ago, and made her my
sister for stage purposes because I was lonely, and liked her American
simplicity and twang. He departed full of tea and satisfaction.

* * * * *

It was our last night at the Aquarium. The place was crammed. The houses
where I performed were always crammed. Our turn was in three parts, and
lasted half an hour. The first part was a skirt dance in full afternoon
dress (_danse de modernite_, I called it); the second was a double
horizontal bar act; the third was the famous act of the red and the blue
ropes, in full evening dress. It was 10.45 when we climbed the silk
ladders for the third part. High up in the roof, separated from each
other by nearly the length of the great hall, Sally and I stood on two
little platforms. I held the ends of the red and the blue ropes. I had
to let the blue rope swing across the hall to her. She would seize it,
and, clutching it, swoop like the ball of an enormous pendulum from her
platform to mine. (But would she?) I should then swing on the red rope
to the platform she had left.

Then the band would stop for the thrilling moment, and the lights would
be lowered. Each lighting and holding a powerful electric
hand-light--one red, one blue--we should signal the drummer and plunge
simultaneously into space, flash past each other in mid-flight,
exchanging lights as we passed