“You never asked me....  Of course, if you prefer it, I could come here as a day governess and leave after tea....  You see it’s a longish journey home:  I’m bound to be late....”

“What’s the difference?  Come and go as you please....  Of course, you won’t mind using the back door when there’s a party ... the servants....”

For the deception Eileen at first salved her conscience Irish-wise by sending every farthing to her mother under the deceiving pretext of rich private pupils.  She would not even deduct for cabs.  Sometimes she could not get an omnibus, but she almost preferred to walk till she was footsore, for both riding and walking were forms of penance.  The stuffy omnibus interior after the smoky Hall was nauseating, and in those days no lady thought of climbing the steep ladder to the slanting roof.  But it sometimes happened that a crawling cabman coming westward would invite her to a free ride, and Eileen would accept gratefully, and, moreover, gain from conversations with her drivers new material for her songs.

This period of her life was almost as amusing as she had anticipated; her only depressions came from the children of the footlights, and the necessity of adjusting herself superficially to her environment, under pain of unpopularity.  Her isolation and the privacy of her home-life already made sufficiently for that.  And to be disliked even by those she disliked Eileen disliked.  Her nature needed to wallow in warm admiration.  She got plenty.

When, fifteen months later, she agreed to pay Fossy a hundred pounds for modifying her contract so as to enable her to appear at other Halls, she said with a smile, “You deserve it.  You are the only man at the Half-and-Half who hasn’t made love to me.”

Fossy grinned.  “If I had known that, I should have demanded a larger compensation.”

Even the bass chorister had not been able to resist proposing, though his grief at being refused was short-lived, for he died soon after by a fall from one of those giant wheels that were the saurians of the modern cycle.  Eileen shed many a tear over Jolly Jack Jenkins.

With the growth of her popularity before and behind the footlights came heavier calls upon her geniality, and, like a hostess who tries to pay off her debts in one social lump sum, Eileen got “a Sunday out,” and Nelly gave a lunch at a riverside hotel to a motley company of popular favourites.  It was expensive; for the profession, even in those days, expected champagne.  It was appallingly protracted; for the party, having no work to do that evening, showed no disposition to break up, and brandies-and-sodas succeeded one another in an aroma of masculine cigars and feminine cigarettes.  It was noisy and hilarious, and gradually it became rowdy.  The Singing Sisters sang, but not in duet.  The Lion Comique, whose loyal melodies were on every barrel-organ, argued Republicanism and flourished that day’s copy