“The most natural person I should think,” said Miss Flippance. “Really I haven’t time to discuss village carriers, if the show is to open to-night. . . . Do be careful of that drum. No, not inside, blockhead. Come back!” As the tambour-laden slave did not seem to hear, his affrighted fellow-serfs yelled to him to bring the drum outside again, and when he was come, the despot’s skirts rustled majestically back into the tent—they were long and hunched out quite fashionably, which accentuated the humiliation of the male element. But Will remained at the tent door, like Abraham after an angel’s visit, thunderstruck and dumbfounded, but with consternation, not reverence. It was, he thought, the grossest carelessness that had ever occurred in the history of the globe. A respectable girl like that—why, what was the world coming to? Sent gadding about the country like a trollop, perched up horsily behind a carter’s whip—this was what little Jinny had been allowed to grow up into! And that girl at “The Black Sheep”—she who had looked so innocent, whom he had mentally seen as a May Queen, crowned with garlands, dancing girlishly round a Maypole—this was what lay under her poetic semblance. And at the same time—pleasing and perturbing thought—both the unsexed Carrier and the maidenly May Queen were in reality little Jinny: no stand-offish stranger, needing deferential approach, but—in a way—his very own: the meek poppet whose cheek he had always pinched patronizingly, in whose eyes he had always seen himself as a grown-up god. Miss Flippance, sweeping out again, and finding him still hanging about, immovable, had a new thought. “Pardon me—has my father engaged you?” He coloured up in anger. “I brought his bills in passing—that’s all.” “Oh, I thought you might be looking for a job. There’s this drum, you know.” He could have knocked her down. But she was evidently quite in earnest, this outrageous, humourless female, only second in self-sufficiency to Jinny the Carrier. The world seemed suddenly emasculated. “I’m no musician,” he said surlily. “But you look a strong young man and it’s muscle we want, not music. You’d only have to stand here about half an hour a day. This afternoon, of course, you might join the Bellman round the town—I’ve ordered him for five.” “Miss Flippance,” said Will, mastering himself and speaking with crushing dignity, “have you observed my clothes?” “They don’t matter,” she assured him. “We provide the uniform.” “Do I look,” he snorted, “like a drummer at a dime show?” “If you’ve come as a walking gentleman,” replied Miss Flippance simply, “you’ve come to the wrong shop. We’re only wires.” “Oh, I know all about that.” And he slashed savagely with his stick at the insulting tambour, which uttered a bass roar of agony. “Splendid! But you might have smashed it!” cried Miss Flippance. “Where’s the drumstick?” “Am I the drumstick’s keeper?” he answered, with an odd Biblical reminiscence.