conditions."

"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"

"Oh, yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish! But
then you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but
the eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I don't suppose I could
begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player--they aren't much
understood in the proscenium--but there are so many, honestly, that
London being at the top of the hill, I'm not panting up. My way of going
has twice wound round the world already. But I'm talking like an
illustrated interview. You will grant the impertinence of all I've been
saying when I tell you that I've never yet had an illustrated
interview."

"Aren't they almost always vulgar?" Alicia asked. "Don't they make you
sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?"

Hilda threw her head back and laughed almost, Alicia noted, like a man.
She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her handkerchief,
as woman often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed freely, and as much
as she wanted to, and it was as clear as possible that tights presented
themselves quite preposterously to any discussion of her profession.
They were things to be taken for granted, like the curtain and the
wings; they had no relation to clothing in the world.

Alicia laughed too. After all, they were absurd--her outsider's
prejudices. She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar again
for her point of view about the illustrated interviews. "They _are_
atrocities," she said. "On their merits they ought to be cast out of