She swirled through the dance, showing splendid amounts of her thighs, and gliding about sinuously while peeping over her fan, and at the finish there was a perfect torrent of clapping and shouting, with bouquets plopping down on to the stage and chaps standing up and clapping wildly. She smiled now, for the first time, bowing and blowing kisses before the curtain, and then suddenly, from our box there was a great hissing in unison, at which the applause faltered and died away. She turned to stare furiously in our direction, and as the hissing rose louder than ever there were angry shouts and cries from the rest of the theatre. People craned to see what the row was about, and then Ranelagh climbs to his feet, an imposing figure with his black beard and elegant togs, and cries out, very distinctly:

“Why, this is a proper swindle, ladies and gentlemen! That woman isn’t Lola Montez. She’s an Irish girl, Betsy James!”

There was a second’s silence, and then a tremendous hullabaloo. The hissing started again, with cries of “Fraud!” and “Imposter!”, the applause began and sputtered out, and angry cat-calls and boos sounded from the gallery. In a moment the whole mood of the theatre had changed; taking their cut from Ranelagh and his toadies, they began to howl her down; a few coins clattered on the stage; the conductor, gaping at the audience with his mouth open, suddenly flung down his baton and stamped out; and then the whole place was in a frenzy, stamping and calling for their money back and shouting to her angrily to get back to the bogs of Donegal.

She was standing blazing with fury, and when she moved towards our box some of the chaps scrambled back to get out of harm’s way. She stood a moment, her bosom heaving, her eyes sweeping the box—oh, yes, she recognised me all right, and when she began to curse at us I think it was me as much as Ranelagh she was getting at. Unfortunately, she swore in English, and the mob caught it and yelled louder than ever. Then she dashed down the bouquet she was holding, stamped on it, kicked it into the orchestra, and with one last damnation in our direction, ran from the stage as the curtain fell.17

I must say I was delighted: I hadn’t thought it could go off so well. As we crowded out of the place—“The Barber”, of course, was entirely forgotten in the sensation—I came up to Ranelagh’s elbow and congratulated him; I couldn’t have paid her out so splendidly myself, and I told him so. He gave me a cold nod and sailed off, the snobbish bastard, but I wasn’t in a mood to mind too much; that was me quits with Mistress Lola for her brickbats and insults, and I went home in high good humour.