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‘Oh! well, I should say!’ she exclaimed in ecstasy.

When we reached our rooms in the hotel I kissed her warmly. Women do that sort of thing.

Then a card was brought to me. ‘George Capey,’ it said; and in pencil, ‘Of the Five Towns.’

I shrugged my shoulders. Sally had gone to scribble a note to her Valdes. ‘Show Mr. Capey in,’ I said, and a natty young man entered, half nervousness, half audacity.

‘How did you know I come from the Five Towns?’ I questioned him.

‘I am on the Evening Mail,’ he said, ‘where they know everything, madam.’

I was annoyed. ‘Then they know, on the Evening Mail that Paquita Qita has never been interviewed, and never will be,’ I said.

‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I come from the Five Towns myself.’

‘Bursley?’ I asked mechanically.

‘Bursley,’ he ejaculated; then added, ‘you haven’t been near old Bosley since—-‘

It was true.

‘No,’ I said hastily. ‘It is many years since I have been in England, even. Do they know down there who Qita is?’

‘Not they!’ he replied.

I grew reflective. Stars such as I have no place of origin. We shoot up out of a void, and sink back into a void. I had forgotten Bursley and Bursley folk. Recollections rushed in upon me…. I felt beautifully sad. I drew off my gloves, and flung my hat on a chair with a movement that would have bewitched a man of the world, but Mr. George Capey was unimpressed. I laughed.

‘What’s the joke?’ he inquired. I adored him for his Bursliness.

‘I was just thinking, of fat Mrs. Cartledge, who used to keep that fishmonger’s shop in Oldcastle Street, opposite Bates’s. I wonder if she’s still there?’

‘She is,’ he said. ‘And fatter than ever! She’s getting on in years now.’

I broke the rule of a lifetime, and let him interview me.

‘Tell them I’m thirty-seven,’ I said. ‘Yes, I mean it. Tell them.’

And then for another tit-bit I explained to him how I had discovered Sally at Koster and Bial’s, in New York, five years ago, and made her my sister for stage purposes because I was lonely, and liked her American simplicity and twang. He departed full of tea and satisfaction.

* * * * *

It was our last night at the Aquarium. The place was crammed. The houses where I performed were always crammed. Our turn was in three parts, and lasted half an hour. The first part was a skirt dance in full afternoon dress (danse de modernite, I called it); the second was a double horizontal bar act; the third was the famous act of the red and the blue ropes, in full evening dress. It was 10.45 when we climbed the silk ladders for the third part. High up in the roof, separated from each other by nearly the length of the great hall, Sally and I stood on two little platforms. I held the ends of the red and the blue ropes. I had to let the blue rope swing across the hall to her. She would seize it, and, clutching it, swoop like the ball of an enormous pendulum from her platform to mine. (But would she?) I should then swing on the red rope to the platform she had left.

Then the band would stop for the thrilling moment, and the lights would be lowered. Each lighting and holding a powerful electric hand-light–one red, one blue–we should signal the drummer and plunge simultaneously into space, flash past each other in mid-flight, exchanging lights as we passed (this was the trick), and soar to opposite platforms again, amid frenzied applause. There were no nets.

That was what ought to occur.

I stood bowing to the floor of tiny upturned heads, and jerking the ropes a little. Then I let Sally’s rope go with a push, and it dropped away from me, and in a few seconds she had it safe in her strong hand. She was taller than me, with a fuller figure, yet she looked quite small on her distant platform. All the evening I had been thinking of fat old Mrs. Cartledge messing and slopping among cod and halibut on white tiles. I could not get Bursley and my silly infancy out of my head. I followed my feverish career from the age of fifteen, when that strange Something in me, which makes an artist, had first driven me forth to conquer two continents. I thought of all the golden loves I had scorned, and my own love, which had been ignored, unnoticed, but which still obstinately burned. I glanced downwards and descried Valdes precisely where Sally had said he would be. Valdes, what a fool you were! And I hated a fool. I am one of those who can love and hate, who can love and despise, who can love and loathe the same object in the same moment. Then I signalled to Sally to plunge, and my eyes filled with tears. For, you see, somehow, in some senseless sentimental way, the thought of fat Mrs. Cartledge and my silly infancy had forced me to send Sally the red rope, not the blue one. We exchanged ropes on alternate nights, but this was her night for the blue one.