But, to tell the truth, green-rooms now-a-days are sadly dull, slow, humdrum places of resort. In a minor theatre they are somewhat more lively, as there is there no second green-room, and the young sylphides of the _corps de ballet_ are allowed to join the company. The conversation of these young ladies, if not interesting, is amusing, and if not brilliant, is cheerful. They generally bring their needle-work with them if they have to wait long between the scenes (frequently to the extent of an entire act) in which they have to dance, and they discourse with much _naïveté_ upon the warmth or coldness of the audience with reference to the applause bestowed, the bad temper of the stage-manager, and their own temporary indisposition from corns, which, with pickled salmon, unripe pears, the proper number of lengths for a silk dress, and the comparative merits of the whiskers and moustaches of the musicians in the band (with some of whose members they are sure to be in love, and whom they very frequently marry, leaving off dancing and having enormous families), form the almost invariable staple of a ballet-girl’s conversation. Poor simple-minded, good-natured, hard-working little creatures, theirs is but a rude and stern lot. To cut capers and wear paint, to find one’s own shoes and stockings, and be strictly virtuous, on a salary varying from nine to eighteen shillings a week—this is the pabulum of a ballet-girl. And hark in thine ear, my friend. If any man talks to you about the syrens of the ballet, the dangerous enchantresses and cockatrices of the ballet, the pets of the ballet, whose only thoughts are about broughams and diamond _aigrettes_, dinners at Richmond, and villas at St. John’s Wood—if anybody tells you that the majority, or even a large proportion, of our English _danseuses_ are inclined this perilous way, just inform him, with my compliments, that he is a dolt and a teller of untruths. I can’t say much of ballet morality abroad; of the poor _rats de l’opera_ in Paris, who are bred to wickedness from their very cradle upwards; of the Neapolitan _ballerine_, who are obliged to wear green _calzoni_, and to be civil to the priests, lest they should be put down altogether; or of the poor Russian ballet-girls, who live altogether in barracks, are conveyed to and from the theatre in omnibuses, and are birched if they do not behave themselves, and yet manage somehow to make a bad end of it; but as regards our own sylphides, I say that naughtiness among them is the exception, and cheerful, industrious, self-denying perseverance in a hard, ungrateful life, the honourable rule.