Mademoiselle Tarara was not so far removed from first youth as he, but still she was by no means young. Her matured charms, however, were positively deadly to the troops of boys who attended these concerts, and she soon found herself not only a financial, but a popular success. She was fond of boys, and her intercourse with them was far less harmful to them than it might have been. She had a great deal of rollicking fun in her, and she could always sing better and kick higher, when she was spurred on by the enthusiastic clapping and shouting of her young admirers. With the single exception of Rhodes, they were all many years her junior. And if she was fond of the boys, she was also fond of Rhodes, for the very reason that he was a foil for them. Life was behind him, as it was behind her, and she often found his point of view congenial, after too much of the boyish element. So Rhodes was admitted to the privilege of visiting her at her own rooms, which the boys were not, and his battered old heart was in the seventh heaven of delight. The people whom he met at the Tarara’s rooms were of a sort with herself, and all of them were so easy-going and inconsequent, that it was a pleasant reaction from the rather constraining ideal held up to him by his child. Poor old Clem! He had been a dreamer all his life--of the earth, earthy, though his dreams had been--and shifting and unstable as they were in character. The favor which the Tarara showed him now had led him into dreams of a marriage with her, which would establish him for life in the green-room and lime-light atmosphere which he loved, and would give him, not only the Tarara herself, with whom he believed he was madly in love, but also all the other things which he desired in life. In the pursuance of these hopes, he had resolutely concealed from her the knowledge of the fact that he had a child, believing that it would be quite fatal to his cause. In the evenings, when work was over, and the tiny room in perfect order, Clementina would sit alone and think. Of what did she think there in her little chair, so neat and self-collected, with her eyes fixed on space, or else occasionally turned upward to the stars, of which she could see a small bright patch out of her little window? Her experience in this human existence had been so meagre, the avenues of knowledge so limited, that it would almost seem reasonable to suppose that she drew upon former experiences in some other incarnation, for the material of that deep thinking and wise doing, which continually occupied her. One evening, it happened that Clem became conscious of an unusually penetrating and scrutinizing look fixed upon him by this austere child of his, and he imagined that it was in some occult way the result of that investigation, which caused her to announce, suddenly, “I’m going with you this evening, Clem.” “Where?” he said, surprised. “Wherever you are going.”