When you hear dem bells go ding-ling-ling, All join round and sweetly you must sing And when the words am through in the chorus all join in There'll be a _hot time_ In the _old town_ To-night. My Ba- By. And yet it swept this continent, and Europe, and in Japan they still think it's our national anthem. When she had finished, the crowd gave a roar of delight, and clapped their hands, and stamped their feet, and shouted. She had no unusual beauty. Her voice was untrained though possessed of strength and flexibility. It wasn't what she had sung, surely. You heard the song in a hundred cafés. Every street boy whistled it. It wasn't that expressive pair of shoulders, exactly. It wasn't a certain soothing tonal quality that made you forget all the things you'd been trying not to remember. There is something so futile and unconvincing about an attempted description of an intangible thing. Some call it personality; some call it magnetism; some a rhythm sense; and some, genius. It's all these things, and none of them. Whatever it is, she had it. And whatever it is, Sid Hahn has never failed to recognize it. So now he said, quietly, "She's got it." "You bet she's got it!" from Wallie. "She's got more than Renée Paterne ever had. A year of training and some clothes--" "You don't need to tell me. I'm in the theatrical business, myself." "I'm sorry," stiffly. But Hahn, too, was sorry immediately. "You know how I am, Wallie. I like to run a thing off by myself. What do you know about her? Find out anything?" "Well, a little. She doesn't seem to have any people. And she's decent. Kind of a fierce kid, I guess, and fights when offended. They say she's Polish, not Hungarian. Her mother was a peasant. Her father--nobody knows. I had a dickens of a time finding out anything. The most terrible language in the world--Hungarian. They'll stick a _b_ next to a _k_ and follow it up with a _z_ and put an accent mark over the whole business and call it a word. Last night I followed her home. And guess what!" "What?" said Hahn, obligingly. "On her way she had to cross the big square--the one they call Gisela Tér, with all the shops around it. Well, when she came to Gerbeaud's--" "What's Gerbeaud's?" "That's the famous tea room and pastry shop where all the swells go and guzzle tea with rum in it and eat cakes--and say! It isn't like our pastry that tastes like sawdust covered with shaving soap. Marvellous stuff, this is!" After all, he was barely twenty-four. So Hahn said, good-naturedly, "All right, all right. We'll go there this afternoon and eat an acre of it. Go on. When she came to Gerbeaud's...?"