was a passion to be English--a passion feverish, intense, absorbing. When in France Sylvia had first encountered continental music-hall _artistes_, she had found among them a universal prejudice against English girls; later on, when she met in cabarets the expatriated and cosmopolitan mountebanks that were the slaves rather than the servants of the public, she had often been envied for her English nationality: Lottie sleeping over there in the corner was an instance in point. But she had never found this fleeting envy crystallized to such a passionate ambition as it was become for Queenie. The circumstances of her birth in Germany from an Italian father of a Flemish mother, her flight from a cruel stepmother, her life with the juggler whose nationality seemed as indeterminate as her own, her speech compounded of English, French, German, and Italian each spoken with a foreign accent, her absence of any kind of papers, her lack of any sort of home, had all combined to give her a positive belief that she was without nationality, which she coveted as some Undine might covet a soul. "But why do you want to be English so particularly?" Sylvia asked. "Don't you know? Why, yes, of course you know. It was you was first making me to want. You were so sweet, the sweetest person I was ever meeting, and when I lost you I was always wanting to be English." So, after all, her own swift passage through Queenie's life had not been without consequence. "People were always saying that I looked like an English girl," Queenie went on. "And I was always talking English. I will never speak other languages again. I will not know other languages. Until this war came it was easy; but when they asked me for my passport I had only a _billet de séjour_ given to me by the Russian police, and after six months I was expelled. When I was coming to Rumania, there was a merchant on the train who was kind to me, but he made me promise that if he helped me I was never to leave him until he was wanting. He was very kind. He gave me these furs. They are so nice, yes. But I was always going to the station at Jassy to see if some English girl would be my sister. There was once in Constantinople an English girl who would be my sister--but Zozo was jealous. If I was becoming her sister, I would be having a passport now, and England is so sweet!" "But you've never been in England," Sylvia observed. "Oh yes, I was going there with another English girl, and we lived there three months. I was dancing into a club--a nice club, all the men was wearing smokings--but she was ill and I wanted to be giving her money, so I was going to Russia, and then came the war. And now you must be my sister, because that other sister will be perhaps dead, so ill she was. _Ach_ yes, so ill, so very ill! When I will have my English passport we will go to England together and never come away again. Then for the first time I will be happy."