in it; but it was
not so easy to take in a mother! Was there a love affair beneath it all,
Ma asked herself. No, not yet; it might come later on, as with that
apprentice who had run away, or that other one whom she had had to send
packing for being too free with men. But Lily would not leave them like
that.

She did not let her go out. "Glass-eye Maud" ran the errands and Lily
stayed at home, like a good little girl of whom her mother wished to make
a lady. When she did happen to go out, she must not be long, or else it
was, "Where have you been? Tell me at once!" At the theater, when Pa lost
his temper, she could reckon on a mighty fillip, and then it was over: Pa
was sorry, rather than otherwise. Ma, on the contrary, would nag for
hours; muttered inarticulate phrases about "devil," "wild bull," and
"taming her;" there was no end to it. Lily champed the bit! A star,
indeed! Was that being a star? She thought differently! She had seen
others drive up to the theater in their motors, accompanied by gentlemen
carrying flowers, like that famous "M'dlle" at the Palace. Yes, those were
stars: they dined at the Horse Shoe and did not spend their time in
useless housework. Oh, she was quite sick and tired of that life! She'd
had enough of it. Meanwhile, the days passed and the weeks and it was
always the same thing: housework and stage-work; work, work, work....

It was late that morning; they were not practising. Pa had run down on the
previous day to see a troupe of cyclists, the famous Pawnees, who were
back from the Continent, on their way to New York, and performing that
week at the Brighton Hippodrome. Lily was in her room later than usual, as
Ma was not awake. Maud had gone down to the kitchen. The apprentices were
getting up, joking with one another, like tom-boys used to sharing the
same bed at home, the same room at the theater, to dressing, undressing,
splashing about naked in the same bath-tub.

"Get up, Lily," said one of them, laughing and raising her sturdy little
hand. "Get up, or...."

"No," said Lily, "let me alone, I'm dead."

As it happened, on the day before there had been a general tumble, six in
a row, on the back-wheel; one of them, losing her balance, had dragged the
others with her and the lot had fallen flat in a tangle of steel and
flesh. Bucking Horse, Old Jigger, Street Donkey--the nicknames they gave
their bikes--had kicked them to the raw. They showed one another the
bruises on their limbs: