ple with an angelic simplicity. Standing before the long mirror
she surveyed herself mournfully. But this robe too she took off,
kissed, and laid away.

Lastly she put on the blue-green costume, with the turquoise and jade
embroidery. She put on also the hat with the feather which shaded
itself from green into monkshood blue. She put on a veil, and a pair
of white gloves. For once she would look as well as she was capable of
looking, though no one should see her but herself.

Viewing her reflection she grew frightened. It was the first time she
had ever seen her personal potentialities. She had long known that
with "half a chance" she could emerge from the cocoon stage of the old
gray rag and be at least the equal of the average; but she hadn't
expected so radical a change. She was not the same Letty Gravely. She
didn't know what she was, since she was neither a "star" nor a "lady,"
the two degrees of elevation of which she had had experience. All she
could feel was that with the advantages here presented she had the
capacity to be either. Since, apparently, the becoming a lady was now
excluded from her choice of careers, "stardom" would still have been
within her reach, only that she was not to get the necessary "half a
chance." That was the bitter truth of it. That was to be the result of
her walking on blades. All the same, as walking on blades would help
her prince she was resolved to walk on them. For her mother's sake,
even for Judson Flack's, she had done things nearly as hard, when she
had not had this incentive.

The incentive nerved her to take off the blue-green costume, kissing
it a last farewell, and laying it to rest, as a mother a dead baby in
its coffin. Into the closet went the bits of lingerie from the
consignment just arrived from Paris, and the other spoils of the day.
When everything was buried she shut the door upon it, as in her heart
she was shutting the door on her poor little fledgling hopes. Nothing
remained to torment her vision, or distract her from what she had to
do. The old gray rag and the battered black hat were all she had now
to deal with.

She slept little that night, since she was watching not for daylight
but for that first stirring in the streets which tells that daylight
is approaching. Having neither watch nor clock the stirring was all
she had to go by. When it began to rumble and creak and throb faintly
in and above the town she got up and dressed.

So far had she travel