It was almost a minute before Lola recovered her breath. She sat back, then, and put her head on one side. “In that case,” she said in a perfectly even voice, “I must try to get used to the other idea. I think I might look rather well in tights and Cissie tells me that if I were to join her at the Gaiety I should be put into a number in which five other girls will come on in underclothes in a bedroom scene. Of course I should keep my own name and before long you’d see my photograph in the _Tatler_ as ‘the latest recruit to the footlights,—the great-great-granddaughter of the famous Madame de Brézé.’ I should tell the first reporter that, of course, to make it interesting.” Miss Breezy rocked to and fro, gripping her cup. How often had she shuddered at the sight of scantily dressed precocious girls sitting in alarming attitudes on the shiny paper of the _Tatler_. To think of Lola in underclothes, debasing a highly respectable name! Nevertheless, “I am not to be bullied,” she said, wobbling like a turkey. “I have always given way to you before, Lola, but in this case my mind is made up. Can’t you understand how awkward it would be to have you in the house on a level with servants who have to be kept in order by me? It would undermine my authority.” That was the point, and it was a good one. And then her starchiness left her under the horror of the alternative. “As for that other thing,—well, you couldn’t go a better way to kill your poor mother and surely you don’t want to do that?” “Of course I don’t, Auntie.” “There’s no call for you to think about any way of earning a living, Lola. Your parents don’t want to get rid of you, Heaven knows, and even in these bad times they can get along very nicely and keep you too. You know that.” Lola had never dreamed of this adamantine attitude. Her aunt had been so easy to manage before. What was she to do? Thinking that she was winning, Miss Breezy went at it again. “Come, now. Be a good child and forget both these schemes. Go on with your classes and it won’t be long before a suitable person will turn up and ask you to marry him. Your type marries young. Now, will you promise me to think no more about it all?”