stairway leading upward. Groups of people
waited for a signal to dance, to drink, to act whatever part had been
assigned them--people with unearthly pink complexions. The heat was
intense.

With her face upturned to the director, who was mounted on a chair,
stood a childish creature who was pinker, if possible, than the rest.
She had fluffy hair of pale gold. She ran up the stairway presently, and
the light was turned on her. It made of her fluffy hair a halo. In the
strong glare everything about her was overemphasized, but O-liver knew
that when she showed up on the screen she would be entrancing.

He had first seen her on the screen. He had met her afterward at her
hotel. She had seemed as ingenuous as the parts she played. Perhaps she
was. He could never be quite sure. Perhaps the money she had made
afterward had spoiled her. She had jumped from fifty dollars a week to a
thousand.

After that O-liver could give her nothing. He had an allowance from his
mother of three thousand a year. Fluffy Hair made as much as that in
three weeks. Where he had been king of his own domain he became a sort
of gentleman footman, carrying her sables and her satchels. But that was
not the worst of it. He found that they had not a taste in common. She
laughed at his books, at his love of sea and sky. She even laughed at
his Mary Pick, whose name suggested a hated rival.

And so he left her--laughing.

A certain sense of responsibility, however, took him to her once a
month, and a letter went to her every week. She was his wife. He
continued in a sense to watch over her. Yet she resented his watching.

From her stairway she had seen him, and when a rest was granted she came
down to him.

"I'll be through presently," she said. "We can go to my hotel."

Her rooms in the hotel overlooked the sea. There was a balcony, and they
sat on it in long lazy chairs and had iced things to drink.

O-liver drank lemonade. His wife had something stronger.

"I have not been well," she said; "it's a part of the doctor's
prescription."

She had removed the pink from her face, and he saw that she was pale.

"You are working too hard," he told her. "You'd better take a month in
the desert, out of doors."

She shivered. She hated the out-of-doors that he raved about. They had
spent their honeymoon in a tent. She had been wild to get back to
civilization. It had been their first moment of disillusion.

She showed him before he went some of the t