particularly mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of
the Y.M.C.A.; the innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the
demoralizing influence of our vaunted civilization has dragged him
down into the depths of the short clay.

But behind the cigarette on the stage lurks ever black-hearted
villainy and abandoned womanhood.

The adventuress is generally of foreign extraction. They do not make
bad women in England--the article is entirely of continental
manufacture and has to be imported. She speaks English with a
charming little French accent, and she makes up for this by speaking
French with a good sound English one.

She seems a smart business woman, and she would probably get on very
well if it were not for her friends and relations. Friends and
relations are a trying class of people even in real life, as we all
know, but the friends and relations of the stage adventuress are a
particularly irritating lot. They never leave her; never does she get
a day or an hour off from them. Wherever she goes, there the whole
tribe goes with her.

They all go with her in a body when she calls on her young man, and it
is as much as she can do to persuade them to go into the next room
even for five minutes, and give her a chance. When she is married
they come and live with her.

They know her dreadful secret and it keeps them in comfort for years.
Knowing somebody's secret seems, on the stage, to be one of the most
profitable and least exhausting professions going.