For Tony Flip bounded like a large mechanical toy, plumped down again in his chair, turned its back and his own to his guest, and stuffing jewelled forefingers into both his ears cried out: “Get thee behind me, Satan! Avaunt! Avaunt!” VII “Me, Satan!” said Will, astonished. “Who ever heard of Satan refusing to do business on Sunday?” If his last innocent remark had produced convulsive effects in a perpendicular direction, this set Tony Flip rolling from side to side in his chair. “Yankee yumour,” he gasped between the spasms. “Lord!” he said at last. “You’ll drive me to set up a minstrel show, only to get that in.” Will, though puzzled, could hardly help being flattered by these proofs of his facetious talents. It was strange, he thought, how different the conversation went when he was with Jinny. Then the laugh seemed always at his expense. “I should think a minstrel show would be more fun,” he observed. Tony veered round with his arm-chair, ceased to laugh, and regarded Will with large, reproachful eyes. “And you cant about Sunday!” he said. “And then to come tempting me back to that Witches’ Sabbath of a profession.” “Nigger minstrels?” Will murmured, more dazed than ever. “As if nigger minstrels weren’t half-way to your _Othello_. No, you son of Satan. To hell with your capital! Didn’t you hear me say ditto to the rat-catcher? They _are_ dens of the devil—theatres.” “Then why do you run one?” “Me! I don’t class my show as a theatre. Marionettes keep themselves to themselves.” “But you play Shakespeare.” Tony held up his fat glittering forefinger. “We pull Shakespeare’s strings—Polly and me. But there’s no actors the public can drag before the curtain.” Will admitted the difference, but not the moral distinction. “You ever met any actors and actresses?” said Tony. Will could not pretend to that privilege—if Mr. Flippance and his daughter refused to be counted—and there was a long silence, in which Tony seemed to the outer eye to keep sips of brandy-and-water lingering on his palate, though he was really—it transpired—chewing the cud of bitter memories. For suddenly he burst out: “I lived all my life with ’em. I’ve managed ’em for years—or, rather, failed to manage ’em. Born in a Green Room, rocked in a Witches’ Cauldron, and baptized in grease-paint. My ma was a leading lady—she played heroines and my father wrote the melodramas. And they know a good melodrama at the ‘Eagle.’” “Yes—I’ve heard of the ‘Eagle’ in London,” said Will. “Ah, you know it by the song, perhaps: _Up and down the City Road,_ _In and out the ‘Eagle.’_ _That’s the way the money goes,_ _Pop goes the weasel!_” “I never heard a weasel go pop,” Will laughed. “It was the mouse, if anything, though I did once see a stoat crack up before a cat.” Tony’s mien relaxed in a faint smile.