r face it
somehow uncovered her soul. When the two women stripped and got
into their tights, Susan with polite modesty turned away.
However, catching sight of Miss Anstruther in the mirror that
had been hung up under one of the side lamps, she was so
fascinated that she gazed furtively at her by that indirect way.

Violet happened to see, laughed. "Look at the baby's shocked
face, Mabel," she cried.

But she was mistaken. It was sheer horror that held Susan's gaze
upon Violet's incredible hips and thighs, violently obtruded by
the close-reefed corset. Mabel had a slender figure, the waist
too short and the legs too nearly of the same girth from hip to
ankle, but for all that, attractive. Susan had never before seen
a woman in tights without any sort of skirt.

"You would show up well in those things," Violet said to her,
"that is, for a thin woman. The men don't care much for thinness."

"Not the clodhoppers and roustabouts that come to see us,"
retorted Mabel. "The more a woman looks like a cow or a sow, the
better they like it. They don't believe it's female unless it
looks like what they're used to in the barnyard and the cattle pen."

Miss Anstruther was not in the least offended. She paraded,
jauntily switching her great hips and laughing. "Jealous!" she
teased. "You poor little broomstick."

Burlingham was in a white flannel suit that looked well enough
in those dim lights. The make-up gave him an air of rakish
youth. Eshwell had got himself into an ordinary sack suit.
Tempest was in the tattered and dirty finery of a
seventeenth-century courtier. The paint and black made Eshwell's
face fat and comic; it gave Tempest distinction, made his hollow
blazing eyes brilliant and large. All traces of habitation were
effaced from the "auditorium"; the lamps were lighted, a ticket
box was set up on the rear deck and an iron bar was thrown half
across the rear entrance to the cabin, that only one person at
a time might be able to pass. The curtain was let down--a gaudy
smear of a garden scene in a French palace in the eighteenth
century. Pat, the orchestra, put on a dress coat and vest and
a "dickey"; the coat had white celluloid cuffs pinned in the
sleeves at the wrists.

As it was still fully an hour and a half from dark, Susan hid on
the stage; when it should be time for the curtain to go up she
would retreat to the dressing-room. Through a peephole in the
curtain she admired the auditorium; a