nd I even
forgot to have stage fright.

"What's doped you, Olden?" Obermuller asked when the curtain went down,
and we all hurried to the wings.

I was in the black dress with the white-bibbed apron, and I looked up
at him still dazed by the shine of that diamond and my longing for it.
You'd almost kill with your own hands for a diamond like that, Mag!

"Doped? Why--what didn't I do?" I asked him.

"That's just it," he said, looking at me curiously; but I could feel
his disappointment in me.

"You didn't do anything--not a blasted thing more than you were told to
do. The world's full of supers that can do that."

For just a minute I forgot the diamond.

"Then--it's a mistake? You were wrong and--and I can't be an actress?"

He threw back his head before he answered, puffing a mouthful of smoke
up at the ceiling, as he did the night he caught me. The gesture
itself seemed to remind him of what had made him think in the first
place he could make an actress of me. For he laughed down at me, and I
saw he remembered.

"Well," he said, "we'll wait and see... I was mistaken, though, sure
enough, about one thing that night." I looked up at him.

"You're a darn sight prettier than I thought you were. The gold brick
you sold me isn't all--"

He put out his hand to touch my chin. I side-stepped, and he turned
laughing to the stage.

But he called after me.

"Is a beauty success going to content you, Olden?"

"Well, we'll wait and see," I drawled back at him in his own throaty
bass.

Oh, I was drunk, Mag, drunk with thinking about that diamond! I didn't
care even to please Obermuller. I just wanted the feel of that diamond
in my hand. I wanted it lying on my own neck--the lovely, cool,
shining, rosy thing. It's like the sunrise, Mag, that beauty stone.
It's just a tiny pool of water blushing. It's--

How to get it! How to get away with it! On what we'd get for that
diamond, Tom and I--when his time is up--could live for all our lives
and whoop it up besides. We could live in Paris, where great grafters
live and grafting pays--where, if you've got wit and fifty thousand
dollars, and happen to be a "darn sight prettier," you can just spin
the world around your little finger!

But, do you know, even then I couldn't bear to think of selling the
pretty thing? It hurt me to think of anybody having it but just Nance
Olden.

But I hadn't got it yet.

Gray has a dressing-room to herself. And on her