“I’ve got to cover you fellows over with respectability here,” South said.  “Rope-dancing won’t go down with these aristocratic church-goers.”

I remember how George was irritated.  “When I was my own agent,” he said, “I only went to the cities.  Educated people can appreciate what we do, but in these country towns we rank with circus-riders.”

George had some queer notions about his business.  He followed it for sheer love of it, as I did for money.  I’ve seen all the great athletes since, but I never saw one with his wonderful skill and strength, and with the grace of a woman too, or a deer.  Now that takes hard, steady work, but he never flinched from it, as I did; and when night came, and the people and lights, and I thought of nothing but to get through, I used to think he had the pride of a thousand women in every one of his muscles and nerves:  a little applause would fill him with a mad kind of fury of delight and triumph.  South had a story that George belonged to some old Knickerbocker family, and had run off from home years ago.  I don’t know.  There was that wild restless blood in him that no home could have kept him.

We were to stay so long in this town that I found rooms for us with an old couple named Peters, who had but lately moved in from the country, and had half a dozen carpenters and masons boarding with them.  It was cheaper than the hotel, and George preferred that kind of people to educated men, which made me doubt that story of his having been a gentleman.  The old woman Peters was uneasy about taking us, and spoke out quite freely about it when we called, not knowing that George and I were Balacchi Brothers ourselves.

“The house has been respectable so far, gentlemen,” she said.  “I don’t know what about taking in them half-naked, drunken play-actors.  What do you say, Susy?” to her granddaughter.

“Wait till you see them, grandmother,” the girl said gently.  “I should think that men whose lives depended every night on their steady eyes and nerves would not dare to touch liquor.”

“You are quite right—­nor even tobacco,” said George.  It was such a prompt, sensible thing for the little girl to say that he looked at her attentively a minute, and then went up to the old lady smiling:  “We don’t look like drinking men, do we, madam?”

“No, no, sir.  I did not know that you were the I-talians.”  She was quite flustered and frightened, and said cordially enough how glad she was to have us both.  But it was George she shook hands with.  There was something clean and strong and inspiring about that man that made most women friendly to him on sight.