tagious sense of showmanship and came to understand presently that if one wished to be sensationally successful it was necessary not only to be a fine musician but something of a charlatan as well. She learned not simply to walk out upon the platform; she made an entrance. In Paris, where Rebecca managed to buy up most of the press, she had a great following. Women came to the concerts for no other reason than to see her clothes and to study the youthful perfection of her figure.
Success and triumph flared up in her path in whatever direction she turned, yet there were times when the old doubts, the old self-reproach, assailed her bitterly.
One night, as she left the Salle Gaveau after a concert, and stood waiting with Rebecca for Schneidermann's motor to come up, the sight of an affiche bearing the name Lilli Barr in great letters filled her with a kind of terror. Silently she gazed at it, fascinated by the name and the program in small letters beneath it . . . Bach, Schumann, Moussorgsky, Chopin, Debussy . . . all the great names dwarfed beneath the gigantic Lilli Barr. She knew that on the sidewalk, almost within arm's length of her, there stood students, hungry and a little threadbare, who waited by the door to catch a glimpse of her as she left the hall. She knew that this Lilli Barr, whose name was set forth in letters so gigantic, had every reason to be content. Lilli Barr . . . Lilli Barr. . . . She stared at the name with a curious sensation of strangeness, of detachment. Lilli Barr was herself now, and Ellen Tolliver was dead, swallowed up by a fantastic creature whom Rebecca and Schneidermann between them had created. To the world Ellen Tolliver had no existence; she had never lived at all, and she had now to play a rôle—to put on a false face—that the world might not discover it had been deceived. She was still playing the mountebank, the charlatan, as she had done in the drawing-room on Murray Hill behind a painted screen with a Russian tenor and a Javanese dancer. For a moment she hated Lilli Barr with a passionate hatred. She had lost possession forever of Ellen Tolliver. In the midst of her pride there had al-
