"Not worth singing about," he said. "No fun in it." I suppose this is so. People go to the music halls to laugh at, not smile with. They want a target, and apparently they are so constituted that they never relate the experiences in the songs to their own lives. The shilling at the pay-box absolves them from thought, releases them from fact; they, are in fairyland for the evening--or what stands for fairyland to them. Otherwise how could any member of the audience face marriage or paternity at all? The odd thing is that, taking music-hall laughter as the test, the logical outcome is that if in England marriage were either abolished or became uniformly successful, and if we returned to a state of nature and called a spade a spade, there would be no humour left. Jokes came in with wives and clothes. "Well," I said, "I'm sorry if cheerfulness is so impracticable. It would be new, at any rate, and novelty is said to be a great thing." "Not in songs," replied Alf. "They don't want anything new in songs except the tune. They've all got to be about the same things for ever and ever." But for all his ready-made cynicism and London brass, young Duckie is a decent fellow who seems to have character enough to be able to withstand the allurements of the bar. It is an odd way of making a living, but he works at it honestly and hard. He receives sometimes, he tells me, as many as a dozen songs a day, none of them any good at all. "Do you mean all of them worse than the one you have just sung?" I said, rather unkindly. But he saw no sting. "Yes," he said simply. "It is not so easy as it looks," he went on, "to sing even a good song; and to make a bad song, and they're mostly bad, go, wants hours of practice not only alone but with the band. The difficult thing to get is movement all the time." (He meant what a more accomplished artist would call the rhythm.) "It's not only that you've got to have a voice, but you've got to drive every word home too, and also keep it going." This, I gather, is where the value of being unashamed comes in. The music-hall singer must be ashamed of nothing.