ther.

He was very angry. In the first place, his hands hurt him dreadfully,
and in the second place she had forced him to disobey orders by going
out to save her. He did not mutter his complaints. He told her in plain
and violent English what he thought of her, and if she went out there
again he'd be damned happy to let her drown.

Now, it had been some time since any man had had the hardihood or
temerity to upbraid Madame Obosky. No male had cursed her since she
left Petrograd,--and that was four years ago. She had been cursed often
enough by her own sex,--professionally, of course,--but the men she
had encountered since leaving Russia were either too chivalrous or too
cowardly to abuse her, and she missed it terribly.

She had gone through a very hard school in order to become one of the
principal dancers in her land. Teachers had cursed her, teachers had
beaten her,--and they always were men.

When she was eighteen she married a lion-tamer. Who would have thought
that a man who trained lions could be gentle and mild, and as tame as
the beasts he had beaten for years? She was barely nineteen when he
died, quite suddenly. There was a dark rumour that she had poisoned him.
True or false, the rumour persisted, and she soon became one of the most
popular dancers in the Empire. For three years she had a manager who
treated her so vilely, so contemptuously that she tried to kill his
wife, whereupon the unnatural husband refused to have anything more to
do with her.

She was dancing in Germany when the War broke out, but succeeded in
getting over into Holland within a week or two, thereby escaping what
she was pleased to describe as "something zat no woman could endure, no
matter how long she have live' in Russia." Paris and London had treated
her kindly, courteously, but that was to be expected, she repined,
because all of the real men were off at the front fighting. Instead of
being scowled at and ordered about by managers and orchestra leaders, or
brow-beaten by hotel-clerks and head-waiters, she met with nothing
but the most servile politeness,--due, she was prone to argue, to the
unquestioned decadence of the French and English races. They were a
bloodless lot, those Frenchmen and Englishmen.

It was the same in Rio Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Santiago,--and it would
be even worse in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. The Americans, she
had heard, were the worst of them all. They didn't know the first thing
abou