The weasel was a tailor’s iron, he explained, pawned by the reckless snip to raise money for treating the damsels who danced with him on that open-air platform to which the “Eagle’s” audience streamed out betwixt the drama and the farce. He added simply: “That’s where my Don Juan of a dad first clapped eyes on a girl, pretty, of course, but with no more acting in her than Mother Gander. Yet, would you believe it, he shoved her into the lead instead of ma, and wrote a piece all for her, and what was worse it was a big go. That was the last straw, and clasping me to her wounded bosom, she left him, poor ma.” “I should have thought she’d ha’ left him sooner,” murmured Will, vaguely uncomfortable under these frank domestic revelations. “It isn’t so easy to leave a man you’re not married to!” said Tony. Will gasped. “Ah, that surprises you?” said the Showman complacently. With a cautious glance at his daughter’s door of communication, he produced two cigars furtively from his washstand drawer—was he forbidden to smoke, Will wondered. “You’ll find that good,” he said, pressing one upon his guest. “You see,” he explained, as they puffed at these excellent weeds in a new intimacy, “if a woman leaves her husband it makes a scandal he don’t like, whereas a man that’s not tied is only too glad to be rid of her. Oh, I ain’t defending ma, mind you—it only shows she was a born actress. I dare say she’d only sucked up to pa to get parts. But when he unstarred her, fine emotional actress as she was, she could never get her foot in again in London, to play leads I mean, for she was too proud to play anything else. ‘I can play anything except second fiddle,’ she used to say, and rather than cave in, she married a fifth-rate manager, called Jim Flippance, who had only a fit-up theatre (carries its own props, scenery, and proscenium, but not open-air, you know), and made him put up pieces with a kid in ’em to keep me out of mischief, but it wasn’t long before I soared out of the parental nest, and by the time they both joined the majority, poor old birds, I’d been leading man or manager or both in half a dozen theatres, two of ’em London houses.” Will receiving this information with a silent curl of his smoke, as though it were another elephantine claim, Mr. Flippance added vehemently: “Real London theatres, mind you, not those swindling gaffs for paying amateurs described by Boz—that’s Charles Dickens, you know. You’ve read Dickens?” Will shook his head. “Too heavy and high-class for me. They don’t like him in the States either—I’ve heard he wrote a piece against them——” “Ah, but you should hear him read his ‘Christmas Carol!’ There’s a wasted actor for you! Lord, if I’d had the running of that chap!”