lectricians were shoving about the big light standards, cameras were
being moved, and bored actors were loafing informally at the round
tables or chatting in groups about the set.

One actor alone was keeping in his part. A ragged, bearded, unkempt
elderly man in red shirt and frayed overalls, a repellent fell hat
pulled low over his brow, reclined on the floor at the end of the bar,
his back against a barrel. Apparently he slept. A flash of remembrance
from the Montague girl's talk identified this wretched creature. This
was what happened to an actor who had to peddle the brush. Perhaps for
days he had been compelled to sleep there in the interests of dance-hall
atmosphere.

He again scanned the group, for he remembered, too, that the Montague
girl would also be working here in God's Great Outdoors. His eyes
presently found her. She was indeed a blonde hussy, short-skirted,
low-necked, pitifully rouged, depraved beyond redemption. She stood
at the end of the piano, and in company with another of the dance-hall
girls who played the accompaniment, she was singing a ballad the refrain
of which he caught as "God calls them Angels in Heaven, we call them
Mothers here."

The song ended, the Montague girl stepped to the centre of the room,
looked aimlessly about her, then seized an innocent bystander, one of
the rough characters frequenting this unsavoury resort, and did a dance
with him among the tables. Tiring of this, she flitted across the room
and addressed the bored director who impatiently awaited the changing
of lights. She affected to consider him a reporter who had sought an
interview with her. She stood erect, facing him with one hand on a hip,
the other patting and readjusting her blonde coiffure.

"Really," she began in a voice of pained dignity, "I am at a loss to
understand why the public should be so interested in me. What can I
say to your readers--I who am so wholly absorbed in my art that I can't
think of hardly anything else? Why will not the world let us alone? Hold
on--don't go!"

She had here pretended that the reporter was taking her at her word. She
seized him by a lapel to which she clung while with her other arm she
encircled a post, thus anchoring the supposed intruder into her private
affairs. "As I was saying," she resumed, "all this publicity is highly
distasteful to the artist, and yet since you have forced yourself in
here I may as well say a few little things about how good I am and how