That was the fleeting form her panic took, but almost immediately she could manage her lips again.  Her lips, you see, they counted so!  She must keep them firm in the slippery shine of the comedy black.

“Come,” he said, “get your make-up off.  I’ll take you up in a cab.”

“How do you know it’s—­up?”

“Why, I don’t know as I do know exactly.  Just came kind of natural to put it that way.  Morningside Heights is about right, I calculate.”

“So—­you have—­been watching.”

“Well, I don’t know as I’d put it thataway.  Naturally, when I got to town—­first thing I did—­most natural thing in the world.  That’s a mighty fine car with a mighty fine-looking boy and a girl brings your—­our girl home every afternoon about four.  We used to have a family of Grosbeaks down home.  Another branch, I reckon.”

“O—­God!” A malaprop of a tear, too heavy to wink in, came rolling suddenly down Hattie’s cheek.  “Morton—­let—­us—­live—­for God’s sake!  Please!”

He regarded the clean descent of the tear down Hattie’s color-fast cheek and its clear drop into the bosom of her black-taffeta housemaid’s dress.

“By Jove!  The stuff is color-fast!  You’ve a fortune in that cream if you handle it right, honey.”

“My way is the right way for me.”

“But it’s a woman’s way.  Incorporate.  Manufacture it.  Get a man on the job.  Promote it!”

“Ah, that sounds familiar.  The way you promoted away every cent of your mother’s fortune until the bed she died in was mortgaged.  One of your wildcat schemes again!  Oh, I watched you before I lost track of you in South America—­just the way you’re watching—­us—­now!  I know the way you squandered your mother’s fortune.  The rice plantation in Georgia.  The alfalfa ranch.  The solid-rubber-tire venture in Atlanta.  You don’t get your hands on my affairs.  My way suits me!”

The tumult in her was so high and her panic so like a squirrel in the circular frenzy of its cage that she scarcely noted the bang on the door and the hairy voice that came through.

“All out!”

“Yes,” she said, without knowing it.

“You’re losing a fortune, Hattie.  Shame on a fine, strapping woman like you, black-facing herself up like this when you’ve hit on something with a fortune in it if you work it properly.  You ought to have more regard for the girl.  Black-face!”

“What has her—­father’s regard done for her?  It’s my black-face has kept her like a lily!”

“Admitting all that you say about me is right.  Well, I’m here eating humble pie now.  If that little girl doesn’t know, bless my heart, I’m willin’ she shouldn’t ever know.  I’ll take you out to Greenwich to-morrow and marry you.  Then what you’ve told her all these years is the truth.  I’ve just come back, that’s all.  We’ve patched up.  It’s done every day.  Right promoting and a few hundred dollars in that there cream will—­”