Sylvia wished that the rest of the evening could have passed away as impersonally; she found it terribly hard to endure again, after so long, the sensation of being for sale, of being pulled into a seat beside drunken officers, of being ogled by elderly German Jews, of being treated as an equal by waiters, of feeling upon her the eyes of the manager as he reckoned her net value in champagne. There were moments when she despaired of her ability to hold out and when she was on the verge of cabling to England for money to come home. But pride kept her back and sustained her; luckily she had to do nothing at present except talk in order to induce her patrons to buy champagne by the dozen. She knew that it could not last, that sooner or later she should acquire the general reputation of being no good for anything except to sit and chatter at a table and make a man spend money on wine for nothing, and that then she should have to go because nobody would invite her to his table. She was grateful that it was Russia and not America or France or England, where a quicker return for money spent would have been expected. When Sylvia first arrived at Petersburg, she had stayed in solitary misery at a small German hotel that lacked even the merit of being clean. After she had been performing a week, one of her fellow-artistes recommended her to a _pension_ kept by an Englishwoman, the widow of a _chancelier_ at the French Embassy; it was a long way from the cabaret, beyond the racecourse, but there was the tram, and one would always find somebody to pay for the droshky home.