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"Then, sir," said the little chairman, working himself up into a state suggestive of Jove about to launch a thunderbolt "then, sir, all I can say is that you are no gentleman." This was a little too much, or rather a good deal too little, for the Signora Ballatino.
Then Signora Ballatino, clothed in the costume of the Sunny South, where clothes are less essential than in these colder climes, skipped airily forward, and was most ungallantly greeted with a storm of groans and hisses. Her beloved instrument was unfeelingly alluded to as a pie-dish, and she was advised to take it back and get the penny on it.
"Joss Jessop, the Monarch of Mirth," a gentleman evidently high in local request was, for some reason or other, not forthcoming, and in his place the management proposed to offer a female performer on the zithern, one Signorina Ballatino. The little chairman made the announcement in a nervous, deprecatory tone, as if he were rather ashamed of it himself.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, the poor are staunch sticklers for etiquette: I overheard a small child explaining to her mother one night in Three Colts Street, Limehouse, that she could not get into the house because there was a "lady" on the doorstep, drunk, "Signorina Ballatino, the world-renowned "
Then she folded her arms, and stood silent; and the house, from floor to ceiling, rose and cheered her until there was no more breath left in its lungs. In that one night she stepped from oblivion into success. She is now a famous "artiste." But she does not call herself Signora Ballatino, and she does not play upon the zithern.
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