only philanthropic societies, plutocrats, and the
Titans of the theatrical world may persuade themselves that they can
afford to engage them.

It was very late when I arrived at my cousin Sullivan's much
advertised reception. I had wished not to go at all, simply because I
was inexperienced and nervous; but both he and his wife were so
good-natured and so obviously anxious to be friendly, that I felt
bound to appear, if only for a short time. As I stood in the first
room, looking vaguely about me at the lively throng of resplendent
actresses who chattered and smiled so industriously and with such
abundance of gesture to the male acquaintances who surrounded them, I
said to myself that I was singularly out of place there.

I didn't know a soul, and the stream of arrivals having ceased,
neither Sullivan nor Emmeline was immediately visible. The moving
picture was at once attractive and repellent to me. It became
instantly apparent that the majority of the men and women there had
but a single interest in life, that of centring attention upon
themselves; and their various methods of reaching this desirable end
were curious and wonderful in the extreme. For all practical purposes,
they were still on the boards which they had left but an hour or two
before. It seemed as if they regarded the very orchestra in the light
of a specially contrived accompaniment to their several actions and
movements. As they glanced carelessly at me, I felt that they held me
as a foreigner, as one outside that incredible little world of theirs
which they call "the profession." And so I felt crushed, with a faint
resemblance to a worm. You see, I was young.

I walked through towards the main salon, and in the doorway between
the two rooms I met a girl of striking appearance, who was followed by
two others. I knew her face well, having seen it often in photograph
shops; it was the face of Marie Deschamps, the popular divette of the
Diana Theatre, the leading lady of Sullivan's long-lived musical
comedy, "My Queen." I needed no second glance to convince me that Miss
Deschamps was a very important personage indeed, and, further, that a
large proportion of her salary of seventy-five pounds a week was
expended in the suits and trappings of triumph. If her dress did not
prove that she was on the topmost bough of the tree, then nothing
could. Though that night is still recent history, times have changed.
Divettes could do more with three hundred a mon