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as unable as if I really were a mermaid lips.
    and had no legs to walk on, but a tail. I blinked. I had been I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and sweating, and the sweat, and the smoke of her cigarette, had knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of worked upon the castor oil on my lashes to make my eye-liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had lids very sore. I put my hand to them - the hand that she had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many kissed; then I held my ringers to my nose and smelled years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had through the linen what she had smelled, and blushed again.
    thrust them beneath Kitty Butler's nose! I felt ready to die In the dressing-room all was silent. Then at last, very low, of shame.
    came the sound of her voice. She was singing again the I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast song about the oyster-girl and the basket. But the song in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over came rather fitfully now, and I realised of course that as she the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite was singing she was stooping to unlace her boots, and interpret.
    straightening to shrug her braces off, and perhaps kicking
    'You smell,' she began, slowly and wonderingly, 'like -'
    free her trousers . . .
    'Like a herring!' I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now All this; and there was only the thickness of one slender and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think door between her body and my own smarting eyes!
    she saw my confusion and was sorry for it.
    It was that thought which made me find my legs at last, and
    'Not at all like a herring,' she said gently. 'But perhaps, leave her.
    maybe, like a mermaid ..." And she kissed my fingers Watching Miss Butler perform upon the stage after having properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, spoken to her, and been smiled at by her, and had her lips and I smiled.
    upon my hand, was a strange experience, at once more and less thrilling than it had been before. Her lovely voice, her 37

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    elegance, her swagger: I felt I had been given a kind of invitation, and been treated by her like a friend, she was secret share in them, and pinked complacently every time impressed. I worked harder than ever at my kitchen duties; I the crowd roared their welcome or called her back on to the filleted fish, washed potatoes, chopped parsley, thrust crabs stage for an encore. She threw me no more roses; these all and lobsters into pans of steaming water - and all so briskly went, as before, to the pretty girls in the stalls. But I know I barely had breath for a song to cover their shrieks with.
    she saw me in my box, for I felt her eyes upon me, Alice would say rather sullenly that my mania for a certain sometimes, as she sang; and always, when she left the person at the Palace made me dull; but I didn't speak to stage, there was that sweep of her hat for the hall, and a Alice much these days. Now every working day ended, for nod, or a wink, or the ghost of a smile, just for me.
    me, with a lightning change, and a hasty supper, and a run But if I was complacent, I was also dissatisfied. I had seen to the station for the Canterbury train; and every trip to beyond the powder and the strut; it was terribly hard to Canterbury ended in Kitty Butler's dressing-room. I spent have to sit with common audiences as she sang, and have more time in her company than I did watching her perform no more of her than they. I burned to visit her again - yet upon the stage, and saw her more often without her make-also feared to. She had invited me, but she hadn't named a up, and her suit, and her footlight manner, than with them.
    time; and I, in those days, was terribly anxious and shy. So For the friendlier we grew the freer she became, and the though I went as often as I was able to my box at the more