The Orient stifled young life. The _Corps de Ballet_ had the engulfing character of conventual vows. When a girl joined it, she cut herself off from the world. She went there fresh, her face a mist of roses, hope burning in her heart, fame flickering before her eyes. In a few years she would inevitably be pale with the atmosphere, with grinding work and late hours. She would find it easy to buy spirits cheaply in the canteen underneath the stage. She would stay in one line, it seemed, forever. She would not dance for joy again. When Jenny went to the Orient first, she did not intend to stay long. She told the girls this, and they laughed at her. She did not know how soon the heavy theater would become a habit; she did not realize what comfort exists in the knowledge of being permanently employed. But not even the Orient could throttle Jenny. She was not the daughter and granddaughter of a ballet girl. She had inherited no traditions of obedience. She never became a marionette to be dressed and undressed and jigged, horribly and impersonally. She yielded up her ambition, but she never lost her personality. When, soon after her arrival, the Maitre de Ballet took her in his dark little corner and pinched her arm, she struck him across the mouth, vowed she would tell the manager, and burnt up his conceit with her spitfire eyes. He tried again later on, and Jenny told his wife, a yellow-faced, fat Frenchwoman. Then he gave her up, and, being an artist, bore her no malice, but kept her in the first line of boys. It is not to be supposed that the eighty or ninety ladies of the ballet were unhappy. On the contrary, they were very happy, and, so far as it accorded with the selfishness of a limited company, they were well looked after. The managing director called them "Children," and was firmly convinced that he treated them as children. Actually, he treated them as dolls, and in the case of girls well into the thirties, with some of the sentimental indulgence lavished on old broken dolls. Perhaps it was the crowd of men who waited every night at the end of the long, narrow court that led from Jermyn Street down to the Orient stage door, which has helped to preserve the vulgar and baseless tradition of frailty still sedulously propagated. Every night, about half-past eleven, the strange mixture of men waited for the gradual exodus of the ladies of the ballet. A group of men, inherently the same, had stood thus on six nights of the week for more than fifty years.