who, no doubt,
read the Wapello _Courier_ daily, along with their _Morning Telegraph_)
to seek her out, and speedily.

Josie didn't wait for them to take the hint. She sought them out
instead. There followed seven tawdry, hard-working, heartbreaking years.
Supe, walk-on, stock, musical comedy--Josie went through them all. If
any illusions about the stage had survived her Wapello days, they would
have vanished in the first six months of her dramatic career. By the
time she was twenty-four she had acquired the wisdom of fifty, a
near-seal coat, a turquoise ring with a number of smoky-looking crushed
diamonds surrounding it, and a reputation for wit and for decency. The
last had cost the most.

During all these years of cheap theatrical boarding houses (the most
soul-searing cheapness in the world), of one-night stands, of insult,
disappointment, rebuff, and something that often came perilously near to
want, Josie Fifer managed to retain a certain humorous outlook on life.
There was something whimsical about it. She could even see a joke on
herself. When she first signed her name Jose Fyfer, for example, she did
it with, an appreciative giggle and a glint in her eye as she formed the
accent mark over the e.

"They'll never stop me now," she said. "I'm made. But I wish I knew if
that J was pronounced like H, in humbug. Are there any Spanish blondes?"

It used to be the habit of the other women in the company to say to her:
"Jo, I'm blue as the devil to-day. Come on, give us a laugh."

She always obliged.

And then came a Sunday afternoon in late August when her laugh broke off
short in the middle, and was forever after a stunted thing.

She was playing Atlantic City in a second-rate musical show. She had
never seen the ocean before, and she viewed it now with an appreciation
that still had in it something of a Wapello freshness.

They all planned to go in bathing that hot August afternoon after
rehearsal. Josie had seen pictures of the beauteous bathing girl dashing
into the foaming breakers. She ran across the stretch of glistening
beach, paused and struck a pose, one toe pointed waterward, her arms
extended affectedly.

"So!" she said mincingly. "So this is Paris!"

It was a new line in those days, and they all laughed, as she had meant
they should. So she leaped into the water with bounds and shouts and
much waving of white arms. A great floating derelict of a log struck her
leg with its full weight, and with