At last the flotsam that had been stirred up by the alarm of the bombardment drifted together again and stayed idly in what was, after all, still a backwater to the general European unrest. The manager of the cabaret was glad enough to keep his company together for as long as they would stay. It was getting more difficult all the time to import new attractions; and since as much money was being made out of human misery in Odessa as everywhere else, the champagne flowed not much less freely because, since the Imperial edict, some bribery of the police was required in order to procure it. Sylvia was puzzled to find what was fate's intention in thus keeping her from moving farther south: it seemed a tame end to all her expectation to be stranded here, lost to everything except the petty life of her fellow-players. However, she sang her songs every night; somehow her personality attracted the frequenters of the cabaret, and when after a month she informed the manager that she must leave and go north again, he begged her to stay at any rate for another two months--after that he would arrange for her to travel north and sing at Kieff, Warsaw, and Petrograd, whence she could make her way back to England. "Or you might go to Siberia," he suggested. "Siberia?" she echoed. That any one should propose a tour in Siberia seemed a joke at first; when Sylvia found the suggestion was serious, she plunged back with a shiver into the warmer backwater of Odessa. Deciding that with a comfortable _pension_, a friendly management, and an appreciative audience, it would be foolish to risk her health by moving about too much, she settled down to read Russian novels and study the characters of her associates. "You are a funny girl," Ruby said. "Don't you care about fellows?" "Why should I?" Sylvia countered. "Oh, I don't know. It seems more natural, somehow. I left home over a fellow and went with a musical comedy to Paris. That's how I started touring the continong. Funny you and I should meet like this in Odessa." "Why?" "Well, I don't know. We're both English. Talk about the World's End, Chelsea! I wonder what they'd call this? Do you know, Sylvia, I sometimes say to myself--supposing if I was to go back to England and find it didn't really exist any more? I'm a funny girl. I think a lot when I'm by myself, which isn't often, thank God, or I should get the willies worse than what I do. I don't know: when I look round and see that I'm in Odessa, I can't somehow believe that there is such a place as London. Do you know, sometimes I'd go mad to hear a bus-driver call out to a cabby, 'You bloody----, where the---- hell do you think you're shoving yerself!' Well, after seven years without seeing England, any one does get funny fancies." "There aren't any cab-drivers now," Sylvia said.