in the directory, a-paying milk bills and meat
bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of my own, where
nobody's right's greater than my own; where no one has a right but me
and Mag; a place where--where there's nothing to hide from the police!"

There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says--(I went to see it the other
night, so that I could take off the Ophelia--she used to be a good
mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It spoils you,
this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty graft. You lose the
quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the hunted. And--worse--you
lose your taste for the old risky life. You grow proud and fat, and you
love every stick in the dear, quiet little place that's your home--your
own home. You love it so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it
could see you--you who'd always walked upright before it with the step
of the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing to
prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face!

And, Mag, you try--if you're me--to fit Tom Dorgan in here--Tom Dorgan
in stripes and savage sulks still--all these months--kept away from the
world, even the world behind bars! Maggie, don't you wish Tom was a
ventriloquist or--or an acrobat or--but this isn't what I had to tell
you.

Do you know what a society entertainer is, Miss Monahan? No? Well,
look at me. Yes, I'm one. Miss Nance Olden, whose services are worth
fifty dollars a night--at least, they were one night.

Ginger brought me the note that made me a society entertainer. It was
from a Mrs. Paul B. Gates, who had been "charmed by your clever
impersonations, Miss Olden, and write to know if you have the leisure
to entertain some friends at my house on Thursday of this week."

Had I the leisure--well, rather! I showed the note to Gray, just to
make her jealous. (Oh, yes, she goes on all right in the act with Lord
Harold every night. Catch her letting me wear those things of hers
twice!) Well, she just turned up her nose.

"Of course, you won't accept?" she said.

"Of course, I will."

"Oh! I only thought you'd feel as I should about appearing before a
lot of snobs, who'll treat you like a servant and--"

"Who'll do nothing of the sort and who'll pay you well for it," put in
Obermuller. He had come up and was reading the note I had handed to
him. "You just say yes, Nance," he went on, after Gray had bounced of
to her dressing-room. "It isn't su