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me. Her eyelashes were separated into little groups, very long, each group waxed together like a little moustache. She wore a plain black silk dress and a very small gold watch upon her wrist.
    I said what a pretty little watch it was; she was pleased, and took it off to show it to me. “A gentleman friend gave it to me,” she said, “when I was working at Leicester. He
was
nice to me—isn’t it lovely? It cost six pounds fifteen, and then he got something off because it was through a friend in the business. Another gentleman told me that you couldn’t buy a watch like this for under ten pounds. Fancy! But lots of the gentlemen give us quite nice presents.” I murmured something or other, and for a moment she paused to appraise my value. “He was married, but his wife used to go away a lot and then he got lonely and used to come and spend the evening with me. Are you married?”
    “No,” I said, “I’m not. Are you?”
    She studied me for a moment through a haze of smoke. “No,” she said at last, “nor anywhere near it.”
    She told me that her name was Miss Gordon, but her friends called her Mollie. “I do think it’s soft,” she said, “when professionals make up fancy names for themselves, like Edwina or Althea, like some of them do.” She laughed. “Fancy me talking like that! I mean, they call me Carmen here on Friday nights, because I do a speciality dance then—tango—I’ve got a lovely costume for it. I do it with one of the boys here, and he’s in costume too.” Then we talked about her profession; she told me that she was paid ten shillings a week and half the sixpences she earned. “But then there’s the tips,” she said, with studied nonchalance. “Some of the gentlemen are very generous. Then other times you’ll dance all night with a gentleman and never get a bean beyond the sixpences.”
    She told me a little about her pay. It was a good week when she took home thirty shillings from the management; living by herself alone in rooms she could hardly have got along without the tips. I was sorry then that I had made her dig so laboriously for her gold, and so I said:
    “How do the tips run out? Do people double the sixpences, or something like that?”
    She looked across the table at me with something that was very much like friendship. “Not many,” she said generously. “You see, that comes to an awful lot if you dance all evening.” She eyed me for a moment. “You’ve not been to a Palais much, have you? It must be expensive for the gentlemen, having us girls for every dance. Would you like me to go back to the pen and dance again a bit later? Lots of people do that, you know.”
    “Rather not,” I said. “I’ve got money to spend to-night, and I’m just beginning to enjoy myself.”
    She laughed with me. “I like it when people have a good time here,” she said, “because it makes it much nicer, doesn’t it?” And then she asked me: “What’s your job?”
    “I work for a shipping firm in the south,” I said. “I’m in the office.”
    She nodded, and we went and danced again. She was immensely clever at her job, very cunning in suiting her ways to mine. And presently she began to educate me a little in the finer points of her peculiar art. When that happened I knew that she was beginning to enjoy herself.
    She said no more about money, apparently satisfied that it was going to be all right at the end of the evening. She told me a little about her life; it seemed that she had been brought up for the stage in some fifth-rate theatrical school. For a few years she had scratched a livelihood by occasional engagements in the chorus of provincial companies; then she had abandoned that for dancing and had wandered in a desultory manner from Palais to Palais, staying perhaps six months in each. She told me that her home was in Preston.
    “It’s not much fun being on the stage,” she said, “when you’re out of a job most of the time. I’d rather do this. I’ve