“Is there any mail for us?” she asked.
“Up-stays, madame.”
The switchboard squawked abominably and Gloria waited
while he ministered to the telephone. She sickened
as the elevator groaned its way up—the
floors passed like the slow lapse of centuries, each
one ominous, accusing, significant. The letter,
a white leprous spot, lay upon the dirty tiles of
the hall....
* * * *
*
My dear Gloria:
We had the test run off yesterday afternoon, and
Mr. Debris seemed to think that for the part he had
in mind he needed a younger woman. He said that
the acting was not bad, and that there was a small
character part supposed to be a very haughty rich
widow that he thought you might——
* * * *
*
Desolately Gloria raised her glance until it fell
out across the areaway. But she found she could
not see the opposite wall, for her gray eyes were
full of tears. She walked into the bedroom, the
letter crinkled tightly in her hand, and sank down
upon her knees before the long mirror on the wardrobe
floor. This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and
the world was melting away before her eyes. She
tried to think that it had been the make-up, but her
emotions were too profound, too overwhelming for any
consolation that the thought conveyed.
She strained to see until she could feel the flesh
on her temples pull forward. Yes—the
cheeks were ever so faintly thin, the corners of the
eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. The eyes were
different. Why, they were different! ...
And then suddenly she knew how tired her eyes were.
“Oh, my pretty face,” she whispered, passionately
grieving. “Oh, my pretty face! Oh,
I don’t want to live without my pretty face!
Oh, what’s happened?”
Then she slid toward the mirror and, as in the test,
sprawled face downward upon the floor—and
lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward movement
she had ever made.
NO MATTER!
Within another year Anthony and Gloria had become
like players who had lost their costumes, lacking
the pride to continue on the note of tragedy—so
that when Mrs. and Miss Hulme of Kansas City cut them
dead in the Plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs.
and Miss Hulme, like most people, abominated mirrors
of their atavistic selves.
Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five
dollars a month, was situated on Claremont Avenue,
which is two blocks from the Hudson in the dim hundreds.
They had lived there a month when Muriel Kane came
to see them late one afternoon.
It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side
of spring. Anthony lay upon the lounge looking
up One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street toward the
river, near which he could just see a single patch
of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem
umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. Across the
water were the Palisades, crowned by the ugly framework
of the amusement park—yet soon it would
be dusk and those same iron cobwebs would be a glory
against the heavens, an enchanted palace set over
the smooth radiance of a tropical canal.
