"I know quite well who's been at you to worry me," Lily went on. "I know it's Dorothy. She's always been used to being the eldest and finding fault with everybody else. She doesn't really mind Tom's kissing me--she's perfectly ready to make use of him herself--but she's always thinking about other people and she's so afraid that some of the men she goes out with will laugh at his waistcoat. I'm used to actors; she isn't. I never bother about her. I don't complain about her practising her singing or talking for hours and hours about whether I think she looks better with a teardrop or without. Why can't she let me alone? Nobody ever lets me alone. It's all I've ever asked all my life." The feeling between Lily and Dorothy was reaching the point of tension. Sylvia commented on it one evening to Fay Onslow, the oldest member of the chorus, a fat woman, wise and genial, universally known as Onzie except by her best boy of the moment, who had to call her Fay. However, she cost him very little else, and was generally considered to throw herself away, though, of course, as her friends never failed to add, she was getting on and could no longer afford to be too particular. "Well, between you and I, Sylvia, I've often wondered you've kept your little family together for so long. I've been on the stage now for twenty-five years. I'm not far off forty, dear. I used to be in burlesque at the old Frivolity." "Do you remember Victoria Deane?" Sylvia asked. "Of course I do. She made a big hit and then got married and left the stage. A sweetly pretty little thing, she was. But, as I was saying, dear, in all my experience I never knew two fair girls get through a tour together without falling out, two girls naturally fair, that is, and you mark my words, Lily Haden and Dolly Lonsdale will have a row." Sylvia was anxious to avert this, because she would have found it hard to choose between their rival claims upon her. She was fonder of Lily, but she was very fond of Dorothy, and she believed that Dorothy might attain real success in her profession. It seemed more worth while to take trouble over Dorothy; yet something warned her that an expense of devotion in that direction would ultimately be, from a selfish point of view, wasted. Dorothy would never consider affection where advancement was concerned; yet was it not just this quality in her that she admired? There would certainly be an unusual exhilaration in standing behind Dorothy and helping her to rise and rise, whereas with Lily the best that could be expected was to prevent her falling infinitely low. "How I've changed since I left Philip," she said to herself. "I seem to have lost myself somehow and to have transferred all my interest in life to other people. I suppose it won't last. God forbid I should become a problem to myself like a woman in a damned novel. Down with introspection, though, Heaven knows, observation in 'Miss Elsie of Chelsea' is not a profitable pastime."