evening performance at night, till she was ready to drop with weariness. Trampy treated Lily nicely, like a grown-up person, called her by the name of a fruit, or a flower, or a bird, jollied her, called her “little wifie:” it was all one to her. He made her laugh with his funny stories, his fairy tales about himself, his terrible struggle with a snake in the streets of ’Frisco, after a champagne supper: girls, by Jove! He toned down his anecdotes and dished them up for Lily’s entertainment; told her absurd yarns enlivened with mimicry, in which he excelled, like the real mummer that he was, and Lily shrieked with laughter, head thrown back, full-throated.

And there was a spice of fear in it all: was that Pa coming back? No, a carpenter or scene-shifter, perhaps, or else the Martellos, brother and sister, going to practise slack-wire, head and hand balancing. Their father, old Martello, a famous name, lived in London, it appeared, alone with his Bambinis, mere babes still. His other children and his apprentices had all run away, to escape his horsewhip, and the brother in Mexico was continuing the tradition. His brutality, in fact, got him into trouble wherever he went, so much so that the big music-halls were closed to him, for fear of scandal. And he terrorized his sister, Ave Maria, a girl of sixteen, a dark girl with great dark eyes. Ave Maria never spoke to anybody; when she passed through the room where Lily was having fun with Trampy, she fixed a fiery glance upon them, even ventured on a smile, for Trampy in particular, whose lively stories reached her through the partition behind which she dressed. Oh, how she envied Lily! But she passed very quickly, because of her brother.

And this time it was Pa! Lily jumped on to the saddle like mad, played her part to perfection, puffed and panted, as if the last drop of strength were oozing out of her, and Trampy joined in the little comedy of fibbing and dissembling:

“There, like that, Lily, or I’ll smack you!”

“That’s right,” said Pa. “Make her work!”

And, just to show Lily what work meant and that her Pa was not so unkind after all—“It’s for your good, Lily! You’ll thank me one of these days!”—he took her to the stage, where Ave Maria was practising. Now, of course, in the circuses, Lily, occasionally, had seen children knocked and cut about with blows and trained to say, “It was the cat,” when any one asked them about the marks. They were ordinary children; she had rolled about in the sawdust with them, played hide-and-seek with them in the fields of Indian corn; they were children who romped and ran about and laughed. Ave Maria was different. The brother, a savage, scowling brute, was always after her, harrying her with muttered threats. She was in a constant, visible tremble of fear; and, if she slipped on her wire, the fellow snarled as if to bite her in the foot, pinched her black and blue, restored her balance with a blow of the belt, shook the supports to make her fall just to see!...

“Oh, Pa, he’ll kill her!” whispered Lily, when she saw Ave Maria practising.

“It’s none of our damned business,” replied Pa curtly.

Martello’s evil example ended by catching hold of Pa: that’s how artistes were formed, damn it! And, at the thought of the time wasted, he clenched his fists. To have a Lily of his own, all his own, and to have made nothing out of her yet! Still, it was not Lily’s fault. Yes, though, it was her fault, she was so stubborn, so wilful! When he told her to do a thing, why not do it? Instead of bleating:

“Pa, I can’t! Pa, I can’t!”

A brief struggle, in a way, followed between Lily and her Pa. Lily was not built for passive obedience, wasn’t used to it. She no longer knew her Pa. When he came at her with his hand lifted to strike, when he spoke of unbuckling his belt—“Damn those blasted brats!”—Lily eyed him with a look of anguish:

“But Pa, I’m not Ave Maria!” she said. “I’m not a Dago.”

And she raised her little rebellious face to him. He humbled her with a smack on the cheek:

“On the saddle! Up! Quick!”

The child, mastered by her Pa’s strength and energy, ceased to be the spoiled child, became an artiste.... Head on the saddle, back-wheel: just like Trampy! Pooh, Trampy, after a few months of this life, was nowhere, Clifton admired him less and less, Lily was doing all that he did, more than he did; and without a fault, without a hitch, unerring and exact! Pa swelled with pride at the mere sight of his Lily, his four stone ten of flesh and bones fitted to the machine, his Lily, the Lily of his dreams!

“I’ll dress you in velvet and satin!” he said, in his enthusiasm. “I’ll cover you with diamonds.”

Pa, thanks to his indomitable energy, had made something of his Lily, a real artiste, at last! And business was moving, too! He had a contract in his pocket for the States, where Lily would no doubt get permission to do her “childish tricks,” seeing that she was traveling with her Pa and Ma. As for Trampy, Pa had no use for Trampy, made no bones about sacking him on some pretext or other:

“Run away and play with your girls, by Jove! Or whatever you please! Good-by! Ta-ta!”

And off for Denver, whence they were to continue the journey up to Chicago.

It was the dive for good and all into the stuffy atmosphere behind the scenes, which Lily was never again to leave, brick walls, where she waited her turn on the elaborate program of the “continuous performances,” amid the thunder of the orchestra and the lightning of the reflectors. No time to go out, meals consumed in your dressing-room on the top of the basket trunk. In the mornings, new tricks to practise on the stage, in the midst of a herd of girls whom gentlemen in their shirtsleeves were training to sing in chorus and to keep step to the strum of the piano. And ever and ever so many new faces, a tumult of tongues which Lily heard on the stage, in the dressing-room, and even in her room at the hotel, through the thin partition walls: a lingo made up of coarse remarks and thick stories, punctuated with spitting and oaths strong enough to carry a tower of Babel. Lily opened her eyes and ears, heaping it all up, storing it all away behind her stubborn forehead....

And new people, new people: “families,” “brothers,” “sisters,” troupes, troupes, troupes! Or else stars by themselves, “bests,” “uniques:” a female-impersonator, a green-eyed boy who wagged his hips like the very devil and took off the girls; Poland, a Warsaw Jewess, a redheaded, overscented beauty, who did the “Parisienne,” and ever and ever so many others. And Lily, so slender and frail, was the pet of them all. They called her their pretty baby, their petit chéri, and, with their painted mugs, kissed her full on the lips.

Pa detested this “rotten lot” and Pa was not always in a good temper. Lily “under age,”—again! Why, there were even managers who informed the police, so as to be on the safe side; “traveling with her parents; childish tricks; nothing difficult.”... Ma’s indignation knew no bounds: what nonsense to prevent a great big girl of fifteen from earning her living! For she aged Lily as much as she could, to obtain the permission, when no papers were asked for; and she had trained Lily to reply to the indiscreet questions of the officials: was her trick hard? Was she forced into doing it? Lily answered mechanically that she liked the bike very much. And then they allowed her to perform.

As for practising, permission or none, that was nobody’s damned business. And if some old sheep took to bleating—“Poor child, you’ll be the death of