ou
I--_love him!_"

"People don't talk like that," she told the author, in a quiet aside,
during rehearsal. "Especially women. They couldn't. They use quite
commonplace idiom when they're excited."

"Thanks," said the author, elaborately polite. "That's the big scene in
the play. It'll be a knockout."

When Harrietta tried to speak these lines in rehearsal she began to
giggle and ended in throwing up the ridiculous part. They gave it to
that little Frankie Langdon, and the playwright's prophecy came true.
The breast-beating scene was a knockout. It ran for two years in New
York alone. Langdon's sables, chinchillas, ermines, and jewels were
always sticking out from the pages of _Vanity Fair_ and _Vogue_. When
she took curtain calls, Langdon stood with her legs far apart, boyishly,
and tossed her head and looked up from beneath her lowered lids and
acted surprised and sort of gasped like a fish and bit her lip and
mumbled to herself as if overcome. The audience said wasn't she a shy,
young, bewildered darling!

A hard little rip if ever there was one--Langdon--and as shy as a
man-eating crocodile.

This sort of sham made Harrietta sick. She, whose very art was that of
pretending, hated pretense, affectation, "coy stuff." This was, perhaps,
unfortunate. Your Fatigued Financier prefers the comedy form in which a
spade is not only called a spade but a slab of iron for digging up dirt.
Harrietta never even pretended to have a cough on an opening night so
that the critics, should the play prove a failure, might say: "Harrietta
Fuller, though handicapped by a severe cold, still gave her usual
brilliant and finished performance in a part not quite worthy of her
talents." No. The plaintive smothered cough, the quick turn aside, the
heaving shoulder, the wispy handkerchief were clumsy tools beneath her
notice.

There often were long periods of idleness when her soul sickened and her
purse grew lean. Long hot summers in New York when awnings, window boxes
geranium filled, drinks iced and acidulous, and Ken's motor car for
cooling drives to the beaches failed to soothe the terror in her. Thirty
... thirty-two ... thirty-four ... thirty-six....

She refused to say it. She refused to think of it. She put the number
out of her mind and slammed the door on it--on that hideous number
beginning with f. At such times she was given to contemplation of her
own photographs--and was reassured. Her intelligence told her that
retouchin