“Oh, my dears! my dears! If you only knew how for weeks and weeks I had been moaning and lamenting that it was because I wasn't clever that people took no notice of me, you would forgive a vain creature when she said to herself, 'My daughter, you are really somebody, after all--you, you, you!' It was a beautiful moment, though, and when the old mushroom came back to the stage saying: 'What a voice! What expression! What nature!' I felt like falling on his bald head and kissing it, not being able to speak for lumps in the throat and feeling like the Methodist lady who poured out whisky for the class leaders after they had presented her with a watch, and then told the reporters to say she had suitably responded. “Heigho! I have talked about the fashionable people I meet in London, but I don't want to be one of them. They do nothing but rush about, dress, gossip, laugh, love, and plunge into all the delights of life. That is not my idea of existence. I am ambitious. I want to do something. I am tired in my soul of doing nothing. Yes, it _has_ been that all along, though I didn't like to tell you so before. There are people who are born in the midst of greatness and they don't know how to use it. But to be one of the world's celebrities, that is so different! To have won the heart of the world, so that the world knows you and thinks of you and loves you! Say it is by your voice you do it and that your world is the concert hall, or even the music hall--what matter? You needn't _live_ music hall, whatever the life inside of it. And then that great dark void peopled with faces; that laugh or cry just as you please to make them--confess; that it would be magnificent, my dear ones! “I am to go again to-night to hear what Mr. Sefton has to propose, but already this dingy little bedroom smiles upon me, and even the broken tiles in the backyard might be the pavement of paradise! If it is true what he tells me---Well, he that hath the bride is the bridegroom, and if my doings hereafter don't make your hair curl I will try to show the inhabitants of this stupid old earth what a woman can do in spite of every disadvantage. I shall not be sorry to leave this place either. The rats in these old London houses (judging by their cries of woe) hold a nightly carnival for the eating up of the younger members of the family. And then Mrs. Jupe and Mr. Jupe--Mr. Dupe I call him--she deceives him so dreadfully with her gadding about----But anon, anon, good people!