"You never know what will happen. I had a friend once--a Mrs. Beardmore. She was housekeeper to two maiden ladies in Portman Square--well, housekeeper, she was more of a companion because one of them was stone deaf. One summer they went away to Scarborough, and when they came back some burglars had brought a furniture-van three days running and emptied the whole house, all but the bell-pulls. Drove back, they did, from King's Cross in a four-wheeler, and the first thing they saw was a large board up--TO BE LET OR SOLD. A fine how-de-do there was in Portman Square, I can tell you; and the sister that was deaf had left her ear-trumpet in the train and nobody couldn't explain to her what had happened." So Mrs. Gainsborough, whose fears had been heightened by the repetition of this tale, went back to London with what she described as a collection of vulgarities for Mrs. Marsham. Sylvia went away on tour. Sylvia found the life of a music-hall singer on tour very solitary. Her fellow-vagabonds were so much more essentially mountebanks than in England, and so far away from normal existence, that even when she traveled in company because her next town coincided with the next town of other players, she was never able to identify herself with them, as in England she had managed to identify herself with the other members of the chorus. She found that it paid her best to be English, and to affect in her songs an almost excessive English accent. She rather resented the exploitation of her nationality, because it seemed to her the same kind of appeal that would have been made by a double-headed woman or a performing seal. Nobody wanted her songs to be well rendered so much as unusually rendered; everybody wanted to be surprised by her ability to sing at all in French. But if the audiences wished her to be English, she found that being English off the stage was a disadvantage among these continental mountebanks. Sylvia discovered the existence of a universal prejudice against English actresses, partly on account of their alleged personal uncleanliness, partly on account of their alleged insincerity. On several occasions astonishment was expressed at the trouble she took with her hair and at her capacity for being a good _copaine_; when, later on, it would transpire that she was half French, everybody would find almost with relief an explanation of her apparent unconformity to rule.