Tipping the Velvet
grief. My family would have thought me alarming than I could have thought possible.
    cruel, I know, to see me laugh while they were sad at home There was much, of course, to look at. Mr Bliss had without me; but oh! I could no more not have smiled, that suggested we take in the sights a little before we headed for afternoon, than not drawn breath, or sweated.
    Brixton, so now we rolled into Trafalgar Square - towards 69

    70

    Nelson on his pillar, and the fountains, and the lovely, took a turn before the footlights - as 'Walter Waters, bone-coloured front of the National Gallery, and the view Character Baritone' - for sheer love of the profession. I down Whitehall to the Houses of Parliament.
    knew none of this that day in the brougham - but I began to
    'My brother,' I said, as I pressed my face to the window to guess a little of it. For we had reached Pall Mall and turned gaze at it all, 'said I would be run down by a tram in into the Haymarket, where the theatres and the music halls Trafalgar Square, if ever I came to London.'
    begin; and as we rumbled past them he raised his hand and Mr Bliss looked grave. 'Your brother was very sensible to tilted the brim of his hat in a kind of salute. I have seen old warn you, Miss Astley - but sadly misinformed. There are Irishwomen, passing before a church, do something similar.
    no trams in Trafalgar Square - only buses and hansoms, and
    'Her Majesty's,' he said, nodding to a handsome building on broughams like our own. Trams are for common people; his left: 'my father saw Jenny Lind, the Swedish you should have to go quite as far as Kilburn, I'm afraid, or Nightingale, make her debut there. The Haymarket: Camden Town, in order to be struck by a tram.'
    managed by Mr Beerbohm Tree. The Criterion, or Cri: a I smiled uncertainly. I did not know, quite, what to make of marvel of a theatre, built entirely underground.' Theatre Mr Bliss, to whom my future and my happiness had been so upon theatre, hall upon hall; and he knew all their histories.
    recently, and so unexpectedly, entrusted. While he
    'Ahead of us, the London Pavilion. Down there' - we addressed himself to Kitty, and directed our attention every squinted along Great Windmill Street - 'the Trocadero so often to some scene or character in the street beyond, I Palace. On our right, the Prince's Theatre.' We passed into studied him. He was a little younger, I saw, than I had taken Leicester Square; he took a breath. 'And finally," he said -
    him to be at first. That night in Kitty's dressing-room I had and here he removed his hat entirely, and held it in his lap -
    thought him almost middle-aged; now I guessed him to be
    'finally, the Empire and the Alhambra, the handsomest one- or two-and-thirty, at the most. He was an impressive, music halls in England, where every artiste is a star, and the rather than a handsome, man, but for all his flash and his audience is so distinguished that even the gay girls in the speeches, rather homely: I thought he must have a little gallery - if you'll pardon my French, Miss Butler, Miss wife who loved him, and a baby; and that if he did not -
    Astley - wear furs, and pearls, and diamonds.'
    which, in fact, was the case - that he should have. I knew He tapped on the ceiling of the brougham, and the driver nothing, then, of his history, but learned later that he came drew to a halt at a corner of the little garden in the middle from an old, respectable, theatrical family (his real name of the square. Mr Bliss opened the carriage door, and led us was no more Bliss, of course, than Kitty's was Butler); that to its centre. Here, with William Shakespeare on his marble he had left the legitimate stage when he was still a young pedestal at our backs, we gazed, all three of us, at the man, in order to work the halls as a comic singer; and that glorious fagades of the Empire and the Alhambra - the he managed, now, a dozen artistes, but still, on occasion, former with its columns and its glinting cressets,

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