CHAPTER I

“And I said to him: ‘My deah boy, don’t talk to me as if I were your wife! And don’t imagine you’re the only twin six in town.’ And we settled it right then and there.” The full pouting lips broadened into a reminiscent smile. The pink and white cheeks dimpled. Miss Mariette Mallard, accent on the last syllable, laid her trump card on the table for the benefit of her listener whose black eyes sparkled with gratifying interest. “And then he went out and bought me a big—”

Just what the “big” was remained a question, for Miss Mariette halted as a girl slid into the chair next to hers and stretched out a hand to dust a film of powder from the face of her mirror. They formed a queer assortment, those mirrors, all shapes and sizes, propped against both sides of the rack that ran down the center of the long make-up table.

Above them, on a wire stretching from one dusty white washed wall to the other, was suspended a row of electric lights in a tin reflector. Before them, dumped hodge-podge, were boxes of rouge and mascaro, rabbits’ feet, puffs and eyebrow brushes. Into them gazed as many types as there are flowers of the field, with just two traits in common,—all were slender as birch trees, all young as Eve before the serpent appeared. Except that to most the apple was no longer forbidden fruit.

At the moment there were some sixteen in various stages of preparing for the costume, largely imagination, which the prettiest chorus on Broadway wore in Scene I of “Good Night Cap.” It was one of those musical mélanges commonly known as girlie shows, and advertised in red splashes of poster as “A Bevy of Beauties All under Twenty.” Its prescription is filled each season with merely a change of lights and trappings to distinguish it from its predecessor.

The bloods of New York patronize the Summer Garden with a loyalty that brings them back at least once a week. The one theater in town it is in which the chorus fraternizes with the audience, tripping down a runway into the aisles to trill their syncopated love ditties into the ears of selected members, or swinging overhead on ropes of roses, bare knees perilously near bald heads. Buyers, politicians, traveling salesmen, miners and perfectly proper tired business men with their smiling better halves all enter the place with a twinkle of anticipation and come out humming a medley of haunting tunes.

On the night in question, one of early March, Miss Mariette Mallard’s voluminous moleskin wrap was draped over the back of her chair and she pulled it round her with a pretty baby shiver as she scanned the girl who had just come in. Then she winked at the black-eyed one.

“Well,” she observed, forgetting to go on with her story, “how is mamma’s sparkler to-night?”

The girl bit her lip, then turned with a grin that was not in her eyes and flashed under Miss Mariette’s little nose the hand that had dusted the mirror. On its third finger blinked a diamond, the size and brilliance of which was breath taking.

Miss Mallard promptly turned her attention to the black-eyed one. “Gracie deah, suppose you had a block of ice like that—wouldn’t you try to make your clothes live up to it?”

The black-eyed one giggled: “And I wouldn’t be so upstage about it until I did.”

The object of their amusement set her teeth and turned back to the mirror, addressing the reflection: “I pay cash for my clothes. That’s more than some people can say.”

The black-eyed one giggled again. “They look it,” she murmured sweetly.

Miss Mariette indulged in a smile still more saccharine. “They look as if you paid nothing for them, my deah. Take my advice and pay cash to get rid of them.” She gave a dismissing flourish of her small hand and patted her pale blonde ringlets.

The chorus girl of to-day buys her hats on Fifth Avenue and borrows her manner from the same thoroughfare. She never forgets that a lead awaits her if she’s clever enough to look and act the part. Not that Miss Mallard had any ambitions in that direction. She was content to be cute and cuddly and first on the left in the front row. But she did try to live up to the moleskin cloak and the car that called for her every night. Only at unguarded moments did Second Avenue scratch through Fifth. “You don’t know how to manage him, my deah,” she concluded, baby blue eyes fastened on the radiant stone.

The girl’s lips opened, then shut tight. She had told them where the ring came from—and they didn’t believe her. Besides, if she tried to answer them she’d cry, and she’d die rather than let them see her do that! It was the same struggle she went through every night and two matinées a week—sometimes with bravado, more often in choking silence. Somehow they made her ashamed, those two, that for her the apple still hung high on the tree. If they wanted to think some man had given her the diamond, so much the better! It would make her seem popular—less a little fool!

She downed the tears by vigorous motion.... She sprang up—a kick of her heel sent her chair spinning—and ripping open her one-piece serge dress, she tossed it on the hook in the wall where hung a plain brown ulster and imitation seal turban—alley cat caught in the rain, Miss Mariette had christened it. Then she gritted her teeth, pulled the chair back into place and slashed on make-up.

Sallie MacMahon, listed in chorus annals as Zara May, was one of those who merited the splashing announcement of the red posters. Perhaps it was her long mermaid hair with its glisten of sunset on the sea; perhaps the fact that the lashes shading her deep blue eyes were the same gold; perhaps the transparent quality of her skin with the swift play of young blood under the surface; but whatever it was, Sallie’s beauty held a luminous quality Sallie herself did not possess. Sallie was just a girl, with a facility for doing what she was told. The daughter of a Scotch father with somber eyes and an Irish mother with laughing ones, both of whom had sailed the misty river into unknown lands after a stormy sojourn together in this one, she had been left at fifteen to take care of herself, with a love of the beautiful on one hand warring against a sense of economy on the other.

Sallie loved soft furs and clinging silks such as swept into the chorus dressing-room nightly. But she had no desire to follow the tortuous path by which such luxuries are achieved. However, the fact that the Mallard girl and Grace assumed she had done so, did not at all disturb her. It was their ridicule she feared, their jibes at her clothes. Speeding across the stone floor under the Summer Garden stage she tried to bring a smile to her lips. They merely trembled.

There came the march of a military air and the girls filed up the wobbly wooden steps and through a trap door. Sallie fluffed up her abbreviated skirt, brought the smile to her lips, fixed it as if it had been glued there. Her young, elastic body rippled through the number under the changing lights. She loved the jazz, loved the stir of rhythm, and had it not been for the ache in her heart whenever she set foot in the theater, she would have loved the work. She was nineteen. Music was in her blood.

She danced through the varying scenes with swift changes of costume, hurried dabs of powder, and little time to nurse her woes. A number toward the end of Act II was her favorite. It was the one in which the girls trooped down the runway and trilled to some not always embarrassed male occupant of an aisle seat:—

“Oh-oh-oh-oh-h-h-h-h— Won’t you—smile at me?”

Often as she swayed through it, it never failed to give her a thrill. Likewise she never failed to get what she demanded.

To-night, as she syncopated down the aisle, a light like blue fire darted from her deep eyes. Kindled by the smouldering defiance of earlier evening it was utterly unconscious of seeking an object. But the gentleman in the particular seat that was her territory could scarcely have been expected to know that. To him it constituted challenge.

“Oh-oh-oh-oh-h-h-h-h— Won’t you—smile at me?”

urged Sallie.

The man’s lips parted. “You just bet I will!” came in a flash of white teeth.

Sallie’s mind was not photographic. It registered no definite impression of the individuals occupying her particular aisle seat. They came and went, vague as shadows. But this man’s response and his quick flashing smile with its personal note, made her suddenly realize that she had been singing to the same pleasant grin every night that week.

She was still wondering about him as Miss Mariette, at the close of the performance, stepped into a short-waisted chiffon dress and, pulling it over slender hips, slipped her arms through the spangled shoulder straps. She and Grace were booked for a party, and the latter emerged like a full-blown rose, black eyes dancing above a gown of American beauty satin. Then both sat down and took some of the make-up off their faces.

Sallie was in the act of pinning on the alley cat.

“Do show him to us, my deah!” persiflaged Miss Mallard. “Don’t be so-er-close, even if he is.”

Sallie jabbed the pin into her head, winced in pain and, with chin trembling and eyes hot with starting tears, hurried into the corridor followed by the familiar titter. Blindly she made her way up the stairs to the stage entrance.

Outside, a blaze of changing lights proclaimed that Broadway was rubbing the sleep from her eyes and preparing to dance. A gold haze lined the sky, veiling the night even to the silver-white buildings that reared their heads high into the heavens. Lined up at the curb was a row of taxis. The modern stage door Johnny no longer stands, bouquet in hand. He remains discreetly in his cab or car and only when the lady of his choice emerges does he do likewise.

As Sallie started to cross the street someone called “Good-evening.” But that being a familiar method of address, she passed on without a glance.

“I say,” pleaded the voice, “won’t you smile at me again?”

Sallie turned then. Descending from a big yellow car which, had she known more of auto aristocracy, would have stamped itself as of prohibitive peerage, was the man of the aisle seat.

He came nearer.

Sallie turned flutteringly on her heel.

“Wait, please,” he begged and his teeth gleamed as they had in the theater. They were nice teeth in a boyish mouth, and upon Sallie they had a disarming effect. In spite of an instinctive impulse to run, she hesitated. The talon scratches inflicted in the chorus dressing-room were still bleeding and the smile of the man who had ceased to be a shadow was balm.

He reached her, lifted his hat.

Sallie shifted uncertainly from one foot to the other.

“Come for a ride, won’t you?” he asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” she answered promptly.

“Why not?”

“I—I just couldn’t, that’s all.”

He gave her a curious, somewhat puzzled look. “Round the park—once?”

“I—I—no, thank you, I couldn’t.”

“Then let me drive you home.”

“I—I don’t live very far. I always walk it.”

“Well, ride it to-night. Please!” Again that disarming gleam.

Sallie looked up with eyes clouded and a tremor on her lips. “It’s nice of you to want to take me, but—”

“But I’ve been coming here every night this week trying to make a hit with you, and until to-night you never even knew I was alive. Don’t you think you ought to be a little kind to a fellow who’s as devoted as that?”

“I—I’d like to, awfully—but—”

“Then what’s to prevent?”

She looked down, tracing a pattern with the toe of her boot.

“Please—I—thanks just the same,” she brought out finally.

She took a step toward the curb, away from him.

And just then came one of those feathery gusts that send whirling the wheel of fate. Miss Mariette Mallard and Grace issued from the stage door, their exchange of glances telling too plainly that they were still enjoying the laugh at her expense. At the curb waited a limousine quite overshadowed by the gorgeousness of the big yellow touring car. They drew near, still giggling.

Swift as a bird, Sallie veered back to him. Instantly he was at her side.

“You can take me home”—it was breathless—“I’ll let you do that.”

Eagerly he helped her in, took his place at the wheel. Sallie turned with the air of royalty. With the sweetest of smiles, her head inclined in the direction of the two girls. As the car sped round the corner she saw them halt abruptly and, like Lot’s wife, stand rooted where they stopped.