He pictured Gritty, with her snub nose and saucy eyes, singing "I'm called little Buttercup, de-ah little Buttercup"
Veronique and Hamlet, alas, were being played in Perth. Perth was an elegant city, compared with the grubby seaport. But his heart was none the less in the grubby seaport, for it represented his first glimpse and taste of exoticism. Nothing in life could ever eclipse his first walk along the shopping streets of Freemantle, nothing could ever be as sweet as the first "lolly" he had put into his mouth, nothing quite so thrilling in its way as the first order he had ever given a waitress, in a funny tea-shop where there were only three tables!
One of the sharpest thrills of all had come during his first walk through the streets of Perth. In a baker's window he had seen a placard advertising a recital to be given by Madame Melba. For a moment the material world fell away, he was transported straight into a world of tangible dreams, and he realized that the great life of adventure had begun in earnest. For Melba was one of the immortal figures portrayed in Aunt Verona's big blue volume of musical celebrities. How well he recalled the portrait—the long plaits of hair, the eyes lifted toward heaven, the hands clasping a prayer book. In the same volume were portraits of Max Alvary, and Frances Saville, Jean de Reszke, Paderewski, Patti, Rubinstein and a dozen others. He had thought of them as creatures who had had their being in a world quite remote from any he would ever be likely to know. True, Aunt Verona had once breathed the atmosphere of that faery world, but that only enhanced the glamour. It had never occurred to him that those creatures might still be alive; the mere fact that their photographs were in a book seemed to throw them into some dim past. And now, here in Perth, was an announcement that the fabulous
