“So you think you want to go on the stage, do you?”

“Yes, ’m, I thought it might be right nice for me if I could.”

“Joe, go out and get some beer for us, and then I ’ll hear your sister sing.”

Miss Sterling talked as if she were a manager and had only to snap her fingers to be obeyed.  When Joe came back with the beer, Kitty drank a glass.  She did not like it, but she would not offend her hostess.  After this she sang, and Miss Sterling applauded her generously, although the young girl’s nervousness kept her from doing her best.  The encouragement helped her, and she did better as she became more at home.

“Why, child, you ’ve got a good voice.  And, Joe, you ’ve been keeping her shut up all this time.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

The young man had little to say.  He had brought Kitty almost under a protest, because he had no confidence in her ability and thought that his “girl” would disillusion her.  It did not please him now to find his sister so fully under the limelight and himself “up stage.”

Kitty was quite in a flutter of delight; not so much with the idea of working as with the glamour of the work she might be allowed to do.

“I tell you, now,” Hattie Sterling pursued, throwing a brightly stockinged foot upon a chair, “your voice is too good for the chorus.  Gi’ me a cigarette, Joe.  Have one, Kitty?—­I ‘m goin’ to call you Kitty.  It ’s nice and homelike, and then we ’ve got to be great chums, you know.”

Kitty, unwilling to refuse anything from the sorceress, took her cigarette and lighted it, but a few puffs set her off coughing.

“Tut, tut, Kitty, child, don’t do it if you ain’t used to it.  You ’ll learn soon enough.”

Joe wanted to kick his sister for having tried so delicate an art and failed, for he had not yet lost all of his awe of Hattie.

“Now, what I was going to say,” the lady resumed after several contemplative puffs, “is that you ’ll have to begin in the chorus any way and work your way up.  It would n’t take long for you, with your looks and voice, to put one of the ‘up and ups’ out o’ the business.  Only hope it won’t be me.  I ’ve had people I ’ve helped try to do it often enough.”

She gave a laugh that had just a touch of bitterness in it, for she began to recognise that although she had been on the stage only a short time, she was no longer the all-conquering Hattie Sterling, in the first freshness of her youth.

“Oh, I would n’t want to push anybody out,” Kit expostulated.

“Oh, never mind, you ’ll soon get bravely over that feeling, and even if you did n’t it would n’t matter much.  The thing has to happen.  Somebody ’s got to go down.  We don’t last long in this life:  it soon wears us out, and when we ’re worn out and sung out, danced out and played out, the manager has no further use for us; so he reduces us to the ranks or kicks us out entirely.”