“Fraternity pin?”

“It’s the—­the beginning of being engaged.”

“But, Marcy—­”

“Archie’s a Pi Phi!”

“A—­what?”

“A Pi Phi.”

“Phi—­pie—­Marcy—­dear—­”

* * * * *

On October 17th “Love Me Long” celebrated its two-hundredth performance.  Souvenir programs.  A few appropriate words by the management.  A flashlight of the cast.  A round of wine passed in the after-the-performance gloom of the wings.  Aqueous figures fading off in the orderly back-stage fashion of a well-established success.

Hattie kissed the star.  They liked each other with the unenvy of their divergent roles.  Miss Robinson even humored some of Hattie’s laughs.  She liked to feel the flame of her own fairness as she stood there waiting for the audience to guffaw its fill of Hattie’s drolleries; a narcissus swaying reedily beside a black crocodile.

She was a new star and her beauty the color of cloth of gold, and Hattie in her lowly comedian way not an undistinguished veteran.  So they could kiss in the key of a cat cannot unseat a king.

But, just the same, Miss Robinson’s hand flew up automatically against the dark of Hattie’s lips.

“I don’t fade off, dearie.  Your own natural skin is no more color-fast.  I handled Elaine Doremus in ‘The Snowdrop’ for three seasons.  Never so much as a speck or a spot on her.  My cream don’t fade.”

“Of course not, dear!  How silly of me!  Kiss me again.”

That was kind enough of her.  Oh yes, they got on.  But sometimes Hattie, seated among her sagging headstones, would ache with the dry sob of the black crocodile who yearned toward the narcissus....

Quite without precedent, there was a man waiting for her in the wings.

The gloom of back-stage was as high as trees and Hattie had not seen him in sixteen years.  But she knew.  With the stunned consciousness of a stabbed person that glinting instant before the blood begins to flow.

It was Morton Sebree—­Marcia’s father.

“Morton!”

“Hattie.”

“Come up to my dressing room,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if her brain were a clock ticking off the words.

They walked up an iron staircase of unreality.  Fantastic stairs.  Wisps of gloom.  Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger.  She could listen to her pain.  That was her thought as she climbed.  How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos.  She must concentrate now.  Terribly.  Morton was back.

His hand, a smooth glabrous one full of clutch, riding up the banister.  It could have been picked off, finger by finger.  It was that kind of a hand.  But after each lift, another finger would have curled back again.  Morton’s hand, ascending the dark like a soul on a string in a burlesque show.