sition, too!

For I am not "an artist," as they all are! I am distinctly quite below
them! I am in domestic service. A "dresser" of the girl whom all of them
call "Nellie" when they are not using the generic "dears" and "darlings"
to her. And yesterday I heard the Serio-singer with the autumn-foliage
hair telling the stout lady (whose place in life seems to be swinging on
a trapeze in emerald-green tights and with a parrakeet perched on each
wrist) "That that little Smith was quite a nice, refined sort of little
thing, very different from the usual run of girls of that class. They're
so common, as a rule. But this one--well! She's the sort of girl you
didn't mind sitting down with, or saying anything in front of.

"Her and Nellie Million seemed to be more like two sisters than mistress
and maid, what I can see of it," said the washed-out-looking Serio, who
"makes up," Million says, with dark brows and well-defined scarlet lips
until she must be quite effective, "on."

"There's something very queer about those two girls, and the way they
are together," added the Serio. (One really can't help overhearing these
theatrical voices, and all the windows were wide open.) "There's that
gentleman cousin of Nellie's, who always calls the other girl 'Miss'
Smith. D'you notice, Emmie? He treats her for all the world as if she
were a duchess in disguise! It might be her he was after, instead of the
other one?"

"With Americans," said the green-tights-and-parrakeets lady
impressively, "it's a fair puzzle to know what they are 'after'!"

She, I know, has toured a good deal in the States. So she ought to know
what she is talking about. But Mr. Hiram P. Jessop is the only American
of whom I can say that I have seen very much.

Each day he has driven over from Lewes, that drowsy old town with one
pricked-up ear of a castle on a hill; and he spends hours and hours
talking to the little cousin whom I really think he sincerely likes.

"And, mind you! I am not saying that I don't like him," Miss Million
confided to me last night as I was brushing her hair. "Maybe I might
have managed to get myself quite fond of him, if--if," she sighed--"I
hadn't happened to meet somebody else first. I don't see any manner of
use in getting engaged to one young man when it is another that you
fancy. Simply asking for trouble, that is. Haven't I read tales and
tales about that sort of thing?"

I sighed as I tied a bit of pink ribbon round the ends of M