Face to face.  The electric bulb in her dressing room was incased in a wire like a baseball mask.  A burning prison of light.  Fat sticks of grease paint with the grain of Hattie’s flesh printed on the daub end.  Furiously brown cheesecloth.  An open jar of cream (chocolate) with the gesture of the gouge in it.  A woolly black wig on a shelf, its kinks seeming to crawl.  There was a rim of Hattie au natural left around her lips.  It made of her mouth a comedy blubber, her own rather firm lips sliding about somewhere in the lightish swamp.  That was all of Hattie that looked out.  Except her eyes.  They were good gray eyes with popping whites now, because of a trick of blackening the lids.  But the irises were in their pools, inviolate.

“Well, Hattie, I reckon I’d have known you even under black.”

“I thought you were in Rio.”

“Got to hankering after the States, Hattie.”

“I read of a Morris Sebree died in Brazil.  Sometimes I used to think maybe it might have been a misprint—­and—­that—­you—­were—­the—­one.”

“No, no.  ‘Live and kickin’.  Been up around here a good while.”

“Where?”

“Home.  N’Orleans.  M’ mother died, Hattie, God rest her bones.  Know it?”

“No.”

“Cancer.”

It was a peculiar silence.  A terrible word like that was almost slowly soluble in it.  Gurgling down.

“O-oh!”

“Sort of gives a fellow the shivers, Hattie, seeing you kinda hidin’ behind yourself like this.  But I saw you come in the theater to-night.  You looked right natural.  Little heavier.”

“What do you want?”

“Why, I guess a good many things in general and nothing in particular, as the sayin’ goes.  You don’t seem right glad to see me, honey.”

“Glad!” said Hattie, and laughed as if her mirth were a dice shaking in a box of echoes.

“Your hair’s right red yet.  Looked mighty natural walkin’ into the theater to-night.  Take off those kinks, honey.”

She reached for her cleansing cream, then stopped, her eyes full of the foment of torture.

“What’s my looks to you?”

“You’ve filled out.”

“You haven’t,” she said, putting down the cold-cream jar.  “You haven’t aged an hour.  Your kind lies on life like it was a wall in the sun.  A wall that somebody else has built for you stone by stone.”

“I reckon you’re right in some ways, Hattie.  There’s been a meanderin’ streak in me somewheres.  You and m’ mother, God rest her bones, had a different way of scoldin’ me for the same thing.  Lot o’ Huck Finn in me.”

“Don’t use bad-boy words for vicious, bad-man deeds!”

“But you liked me.  Both of you liked me, honey.  Only two women I ever really cared for, too.  You and m’ mother.”

Her face might have been burning paper, curling her scorn for him.