nt, and stood on each other's heads and
on their own heads, and perched for a moment on each other's
shoulders, as if each of them was a flight of stairs with a landing,
and the three of them were three flights, three storeys up, the top
flight continually running down and becoming the bottom flight,
while the middle flight collapsed and became a horizontal corridor.

Alvina had to open the performance by playing an overture called
"Welcome All": a ridiculous piece. She was excited and unhappy. On
the Monday morning there was a rehearsal, Mr. May conducting. She
played "Welcome All," and then took the thumbed sheets which Miss
Poppy Traherne carried with her. Miss Poppy was rather exacting. As
she whirled her skirts she kept saying: "A little faster,
please"--"A little slower"--in a rather haughty, official voice that
was somewhat muffled by the swim of her drapery. "Can you give it
_expression_?" she cried, as she got the arum lily in full blow, and
there was a sound of real ecstasy in her tones. But why she should
have called "Stronger! Stronger!" as she came into being as a cup
and saucer, Alvina could not imagine: unless Miss Poppy was fancying
herself a strong cup of tea.

However, she subsided into her mere self, panted frantically, and
then, in a hoarse voice, demanded if she was in the bare front of
the show. She scorned to count "Welcome All." Mr. May said Yes. She
was the first item. Whereupon she began to raise a dust. Mr.
Houghton said, hurriedly interposing, that he meant to make a little
opening speech. Miss Poppy eyed him as if he were a cuckoo-clock,
and she had to wait till he'd finished cuckooing. Then she said:

"That's not every night. There's six nights to a week." James was
properly snubbed. It ended by Mr. May metamorphizing himself into a
pug dog: he said he had got the "costoom" in his bag: and doing a
lump-of-sugar scene with one of the Baxter Brothers, as a brief
first item. Miss Poppy's professional virginity was thus saved from
outrage.

At the back of the stage there was half-a-yard of curtain screening
the two dressing-rooms, ladies and gents. In her spare time Alvina
sat in the ladies' dressing room, or in its lower doorway, for there
was not room right inside. She watched the ladies making up--she
gave some slight assistance. She saw the men's feet, in their shabby
pumps, on the other side of the curtain, and she heard the men's
gruff voices. Often a slangy conversation was carried