?"

"Well, look at you; look at your hat. People, I know, wonders whatever
on earth you are."

"Oh, my own father's ashamed of me now; and what about you? Beer and
bed's all you think about."

Jenny thought she would go and see Lilli Vergoe, in Cranbourne Street,
and tell her of the engagement.

Lilli sat with her feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a cigarette.

"I've joined the ballet," said Jenny.

"Where?"

"At the Orient."

"You won't like it."

"Who cares? I sha'n't stay if I don't."

"Yes, you will. You'll stay. Everybody stays in the Orient. I've stayed
there twelve years, and I'm still a second-line girl. You'll stay twelve
years and, if you don't get fat, you'll still be a second-line boy."

"What about if I get married?"

"You'll still stay."

"You'll give me a headache, you and your staying. I intend to enjoy
myself. You're worse than a wet week, you are."

Jenny was standing by the window looking down into Cranbourne Street
baking in the July heat.

"Isn't it shocking hot?" said Lilli.

"I think summer's simply lovely," Jenny answered.

Chapter XI: _The Orient Palace of Varieties_

The Orient Palace of Varieties rose like a cliff from the drapery shops
of Piccadilly. On fine summer dusks, in a mist of golden light, it
possessed a certain magic of gayety; seemed to capture something of the
torch-lit merriment of a country fair. As one loitered on the island,
lonely and meditative, the Orient was alluring, blazed upon the vision
like an enchanted cave, or offered to the London wanderer a fancy of the
scents and glossy fruits and warblers of the garden where Camaralzaman
lost Badoura; and in autumn, stained by rosy sunsets, the theater
expressed the delicate melancholy of the season. But when the rain
dripped monotonously, when fogs transformed the town, when London was
London vast and gray, the Orient became unreal like the bedraggled
palaces of an exhibition built to endure for a little while. After all,
it was an exotic piece of architecture, and evoked an atmosphere of
falseness, the falseness of an Indian gong in a Streatham hall. Yet
fifty years it had stood without being rebuilt. In addition to having
seen two generations pass away, something in the character of its
entertainment, in the lavishness of its decoration, lent it the sacred
permanence of a mausoleum, the mausoleum of mid-Victorian amusement.

The Orient did not march with the times, rising from insignificance. I