CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
[Illustration: “I’ve decided that you’re not my husband”]
CHAPTER I
OUT OF ORDER! pertly announced the placard on the elevator. To Miss
Darcy Cole, wavering on damp, ill-conditioned, and reluctant legs, this
seemed the final malignancy of the mean-spirited fates. Four beetling
flights to climb! Was it worth the effort? Was anything worth the
effort of that heart-breaking ascent? For that matter, was anything
worth anything, anyway? Into such depths of despond had the spirit of
Miss Cole lapsed.
[Illustration: Was anything worth anything, anyway?]
At the top of the frowning heights the studio apartment of Miss Gloria
Greene would open to her. There would be tea, fresh-brewed and
invigorating. There would be a broad and restful couch full of fluffy
pillows, comforting to tired limbs. There would be Gloria Greene
herself, big and beautiful and radiant, representing everything which
poor little Darcy Cole was not but most wished to be, and, furthermore,
a sure source of wise counsel, or, at worst, of kindly solace for a
case which might be too hopeless for counsel. As alternative, a return
to the wind-swept, rain-chilled New York side street. No; the thing had
to be done! Darcy nerved her soggy muscles to the ordeal.
On the second landing she paused to divide a few moments between hard
breathing and hating the imitation-leather roll beneath her arm.
Including the wall-paper design within, just rejected by B. Riegel &
Sons, the whole affair might have weighed two pounds. To its
ill-conditioned bearer it felt like two hundred. She set a hand to her
panting chest and a thorn promptly impaled her thumb. Tearing off the
offending rose Darcy flung it over the banister rail. It was a flabby,
second-hand wraith of a rose, anyhow, having been passed down to the
wearer by her flat-mate, Maud Raines, who in turn had it, along with
eleven others, from her fiancé.
Darcy stuck out a vindictive tongue at the discarded flower. Nobody
ever sent _her_ roses! Dully musing upon the injustices of existence,
she clambered up the third flight and leaned against the wall to rally
her spent energies, with her hands thrust deep into the sagging pockets
of her coat. Something light and scratchy rubbed against her bare
forefinger, which was protruding from a hole in her glove. Being
exhumed, it revealed itself as one of those tiny paper frills wherein
high-priced candy is chastely attired. The departed bonbon had come
from a box sent by Paul Wood, the architect, to Darcy’s other
flat-mate, Helen Barrett, to whom he had just become engaged. Darcy let
the inoffensive ornament flutter from her fingers to the floor and
crushed it flat with a vengeful foot. Nobody ever sent _her_ candy in
frilly collars! Nobody ever sent her anything! Oozing wretchedness and
self-pity, she took the final flight in a rush, burst in upon the
labors of Miss Gloria Greene, planted herself in the middle of the
floor, dropped her work roll and kicked it as far as she could, and
lifted up the voice of lamentation in the accepted phrase, duly made
and provided for such of feminine sex and tender years as find the
weary pattern of the world too tangled for their solving.
“Oh, I wuh—wuh—wish I were duh—duh—dead!” mourned Miss Cole with
violence.
Gloria Greene dropped the typed sheets which she had been studying and
rose from her chair. She looked down at the lumpy, lax figure of
helpless, petulant rebellion before her.
“Oh, you do, do you?” she remarked pensively.
“Yes; I do!”
“So do most people at one time or another,” was Miss Greene’s
philosophical commentary upon this.
“Not you,” declared Darcy, glancing up at the vivid face above her
resentfully. “I’ll bet you’ve never known what it is to feel that way
in your life.”
“Oh, I’m too busy for such nonsense,” returned Gloria in her serene and
caressing voice.
Indeed, it would be difficult for any one favored with Miss Gloria
Greene’s acquaintance to imagine her wishing to depart a life to the
enjoyment of which she has vastly added for thousands of people. For
under a slightly different name Miss Greene is known to and admired by
most of the theater-going populace of the United States. From the top
of her ruddy, imperiously poised head to the tip of her perfectly shod
toes, she justifies and fulfills in every line and motion the happy
thought which inspired the dean of American playwrights to nickname her
“Gloria.” Deeper than her beauty and abounding vitality there lies a
more profound quality, the rare gift of giving graciously and
naturally. It is Gloria Greene’s unconscious and intuitive mission in
life to lend color and light and cheer to colorless, dim, and forlorn
folk wherever she encounters them. That is why Darcy Cole was, at the
moment, dribbling tears and aspirations for an immediate demise all
over Gloria’s rare Anatolian rug. Not that Darcy really desired to die.
She merely wished Gloria Greene to make life more practicable for her.
“That’s imagination, you know,” continued the actress.
“It isn’t,” snivelled Darcy.
“Then it’s indigestion. Have a pill.”
“I won’t!” declined the girl rudely. “You’re making fun of me. They all
make fun of me. I do wish I was dead!”
“Do you, indeed!”
Setting two slim but powerful hands upon the girl’s shoulders, Gloria
Greene proceeded methodically to shake her. She shook her until her hat
(oh, but it was a bad and shabby hat!) came off and rolled upon the
floor. She shook her until her hairpins fell like hail and her
brown-black hair struggled out of its arrangement (oh, but it was a
poor and tasteless arrangement!) and tumbled about her face (and, oh,
but it was a sallow and torpid face!). She further shook her until her
eyes bulged out and a faint flame shone on her cheeks, and her buttons
began to pop, and her breath rattled on her teeth, and she could barely
gasp out:
“St-t-t-top! You’re shaking me to p-p-pieces!”
“Why not?” inquired Miss Greene blandly, and shook harder than before.
“D-d-d-dud-dud-_don’t_” wailed the victim. “W-w-wait a m-m-m-minute!”
The shaker desisted, still maintaining her grip. “What’s the matter?”
she inquired.
“You’re killing me!”
“Then you don’t want to die, after all?” inquired the other.
“Not that way!” gasped the girl.
“It’s my regular treatment for dead-wish-ers.
“It’s brutal,” whimpered Darcy. “Everything’s brutal. The world’s
brutal. I hate it! I wish I—Glooo-oria! Don’t begin again!”
“_What_ do you wish?” demanded the administrator of discipline
implacably.
“I wish I’d never come here at all.”
“That’s different,” commented Miss Greene, “though it probably isn’t
true, either. Now sit down. Tell me all about it. I’ve got a few
minutes to spare.”
“It’s very long,” began Darcy dolefully. “You’re trying to dodge. Begin
at once. Or must I apply my treatment again?”
“Ow! No! Don’t!” implored the girl. “I’ll tell. But I don’t know where
to begin.”
“Begin in the middle,” suggested Gloria helpfully. “Then you can work
both ways.”
“I will. Well, then, you see, Maud’s gone and got engaged.”
“To whom?”
“Holcomb Lee, the illustrator.”
“Why should that make you want to die? Are you in love with Mr. Lee?”
“I in love with Holcomb!” Darcy’s bitter grin dismissed that
supposition. “I’m not in love with _anybody_. It isn’t that.”
“Then what is it?” asked the patient Gloria.
“It’s the whole thing. Helen Barrett is going to marry Paul Wood.”
“If any woman know any just reason why these twain should not be joined
together in holy matrimony, let her now speak or forever after hold her
peace,” solemnly misquoted Gloria.
“But—but—but Maud and Helen and I,” pursued the girl, evincing symptoms
of a melancholic relapse, “were going to be the Three Honest
Working-Girls and keep up our Fifty-Sixth Street bachelor-girl hall for
life. And now look at the darn thing!”
“What did you expect?” argued Gloria. “Maud is pretty and energetic,
and Helen is one of those soft, fluffy creatures that some man always
wants to take care of. Bachelor-girl agreements are only made to keep
until the right man comes along, anyway.”
“But where do I come in?” demanded Darcy, opening wide her
discontented-looking eyes.
“Oh, you’ll be getting engaged yourself one of these days.”
For once in her tactful life Gloria Greene had made a stupid remark.
“Don’t you patronize me!” flashed the girl. “I just won’t stand it! I
get enough of that at home from those two d—-d fiancées.”
Gloria turned a face of twinkling astonishment upon her visitor. “Why,
Amanda Darcy Cole! What would the generations of your Puritan
forbears—”
“Don’t you call me Amanda, either! It’s an old-maid name. I hate
it—even if it does fit.”
“It is rather a handicap,” admitted her hostess. “But Darcy’s pretty
enough, anyway.”
“It’s the only pretty thing about me. Oh, Gloria,” burst out the girl
in a sudden flood-tide of self-revelation, “if you knew how I long to
be pretty! Not beautiful, like you; I wouldn’t ask as much as that. But
just pretty enough to be noticed once in a while.”
[Illustration: “If you knew how I long to be pretty!”]
“Why, Darcy, dear—”
“No: let me talk!” Darcy proceeded in little, jerky gasps of eagerness.
“Pretty. And well-dressed. And up-to-date. And smart. And everything!
I’d sell my soul to the devil if he’d buy such a weakly, puny, piffling
little soul, just really to live and be something besides a ‘thoroughly
nice girl’ for one short year. ‘A thoroughly nice girl’! Yah!” said
Miss Cole in a manner which, whatever else it might have been, was not
thoroughly nice.
“That’s a rotten thing to say about any one,” agreed the sympathetic
Gloria. “Who calls you that?”
“The girls. You know the way they say it! Well, no wonder. Look at me!”
she cried in passionate conclusion to her passionate outburst.
Gloria looked at her. She beheld an ungirlish frump of a thing with a
lank but bulgy figure misclothed in woefully inappropriate garments, a
muddy complexion, a sagging mouth, a drooping chin, a mass of deranged
hair, and big, deep-gray, lusterless eyes, which implored her. The
older woman considered and marveled.
“My dear child,” she said gently, “are you sure it isn’t some man?”
“I don’t care a darn for any man in the world,” returned the other with
convincing promptitude. “It isn’t that. It’s just that I’m not—I
don’t—” Her courage seemed to ebb out, but she gained command of
herself and continued plaintively: “All I want is to be in the game as
other girls play it—to have a little attention and maybe a box of candy
or some flowers once in a while: not to have men look past me like a
tree. It isn’t much to ask, is it? If you knew how tired I am of being
just plain nobody! There’s a—a somebody inside here”—she thumped her
narrow, ribby chest—“but I can’t get it out.” Rising lumpily to her
feet, she stretched out hands of piteous and grotesque appeal. “Please,
Gloria,” she prayed in a dwindling and saintly voice, “I want to raise
just a little teeny bit of hell before I die.”
A flash of sympathy and comprehension from the actress’s intent face
answered this noble aspiration. “Why, you’re real, aren’t you!” she
exclaimed.
“Did you think I wasn’t even _that?_” returned the other reproachfully.
“Not so many people are. It’s something, anyway. Are you going to be
honest, as well?”
“How, honest?”
“With me. Are you going to be frank?”
“Of course.”
“Then tell me what started you on this.”
A dismal sort of muddy flush overspread the girl’s features. Silently
she drew from her pocket a full-page drawing from “Life” which she
unfolded and handed to the other. She laid a finger on the central
figure.
“That’s Darcy,” said she.
“Is it?” Gloria studied the illustration interestedly. “Who drew it?”
“Holcomb Lee.”
“That scrawl in the corner means Lee, does it? Is it drawn from life?”
“Yes.”
“What does Maud say to your sitting as model for her young man?”
“Maud laughed,” said Darcy between her teeth.
“Pussy, pussy!” commented Miss Greene. “That decided you to keep on, I
suppose.”
“Naturally.”
“Well, the result justifies you.”
“D’ you think it’s pretty?”
“I most certainly do.”
“And don’t you think it looks just the least lee-eetle bit like me?”
pursued Darcy shyly.
Gloria scrutinized the drawing again, and then the wistful face before
her. With growing astonishment she realized the fundamental likeness.
“More than that,” said she. “That young man knows how to see with his
eyes.”
“It was his own notion,” said the girl in a rush of words. “One night I
was sitting at the piano. He said there were lines in my face that he
wanted. He asked me if I’d sit for him once. Then he had me come back
again and again. I didn’t mind. I—I liked it. It was the first time any
one had ever seen anything to admire about me since I was a child. Oh,
and one day he said: ‘Miss Darcy, you must have been a beautiful
child.’”
“Were you?” asked Gloria.
From another pocket Darcy took a small photograph holder. “Exhibit B,”
she said, passing it to the other.
It showed the head and shoulders of an eleven-year-old girl.
“It’s charming,” said Gloria, and meant it. “That’s the way I ought to
look now, only more so, Holcomb said. He said I was a spoilt job.”
“Pig!”
“Oh, no. He didn’t mean it that way. He just blurted it out as if he
was sorry about it. He seemed to think that I was a waste of good
material and—and he was quite peeved about it and kept swearing under
his breath while he was drawing me.”
“There I’m with him,” declared Gloria vigorously. “I hate waste. It’s
in my Yankee blood, I suppose. And a wasted human being—that’s a sort
of practical blasphemy, according to my religion.”
Darcy caught the inference. “Made in the image,” she said quickly. “But
what am _I_ made in the image of!”
“What happened to change you from this?” Gloria held up Exhibit B.
“Well, I had an illness when I was thirteen. And about then we lost our
money. And my parents died a little while after. And I never seemed to
get back much life or spirit or ambition or digestion or anything.”
“Can’t get hold of your own boot-straps?” queried the other
suggestingly.
“Haven’t got the lifting power if I did,” answered the girl. She picked
nervously at her raveled and seedy sleeve. “Lee said he believed I
could look like that—the way he made me look in the picture, you
know—if only some one who knew could tell me how to go about it. D’ you
think maybe—p’raps—it might be just partly possible?”
Once more Gloria compared Exhibit A with Exhibit B, and then both with
the original.
“I do,” she pronounced with fitting solemnity.
“Oh-h-h-h!” breathed Darcy in a long-drawn, ecstatic sigh.
“At least partly possible. It’s worth the trial, in any case. Darcy,”
said Miss Greene incisively, “I’m going to take you in hand, myself.”
“Oh, Gloria! If you would! I’ll love you forever for it.”
“You won’t. On the contrary, you’ll probably hate me poisonously before
it’s half over.”
“For helping me to be something and look like something?” protested the
girl incredulously. “How could I be anything but the most grateful—”
“Wait and see,” interrupted the oracle. “We’re going to begin our
little magic process right now. Presto—pass! You’re a lay figure.”
“A what?” faltered Darcy.
“A lay figure. Act accordingly.”
“What does a lay figure do, please?”
“It doesn’t. It’s dead. It’s dumb. Don’t talk. You distract my mind.”
For several minutes she walked around the girl, debating her from every
angle with pitiless impersonality, and with the analytical eye of the
adept in a school wherein attractiveness is often a personal and
technical achievement. At the conclusion of this ordeal Darcy found
herself perched upon a high-backed seat while the actress expertly
daubed her face with make-up from a box kept for purposes of
experimentation. Next the subject’s hair was arranged, and her figure
draped in the flowing lines of some shimmering fabric, chosen, after
much profound consideration on Gloria’s part, from a carved chest. She
was then told to straighten her spine, and smile. Near her lay Gloria’s
hand mirror. Before the proprietor could interfere the girl picked it
up and sat staring into it.
“Well, and what do you think of yourself?” queried her mentor grimly.
“I—I look like a bad joke,” whimpered Darcy.
“You do. But if you cry I’ll set you out on the fire-escape just as you
are, for the neighbors to throw things at.”
“I’m n-n-n-not c-c-crying.”
“And don’t grab, next time. Well-conditioned lay figures never do. Sit
_up!_ You’re all caved in again.”
With strong hands she prodded, bent, and moulded the girl’s yielding
figure to the desired posture. Finally she wheeled into position,
several yards away, a full-length glass, and turned on an overhead
light.
“Now. Look in here.”
Looking, Darcy gave a little gasp of wonder and delight. Under the
modulated radiance and with the toning down of distance, the harsh,
turgid spots and lines of the make-up had blended into a harmonious
_ensemble_. The face was that of Holcomb Lee’s picture—almost.
“Oh!” cried Darcy hoarsely. “Could you ever make me like _that?_”
“No.”
Darcy collapsed. “I might have known,” she wailed.
“What do you expect for a nickel, in these days of depreciated
currency?” inquired Gloria callously. “It isn’t as simple as it looks.”
“But if you can’t do it for me—”
“I certainly can’t, my dear.”
“Then why did you let me—”
“But if I can’t, perhaps some one else can.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Me!”
“You, your own little, lone self, and no one else in the whole big,
round world,” declared the actress with electrifying vigor. “Thou art
the woman.”
“What must I do? How do I do it? What do I need?” cried Darcy in a
breath.
“Grit.”
“Is that all?”
“All? No; it isn’t all. It’s just a beginning. But if you think it’s an
easy one you don’t know what the word means yet.”
“Pooh!” retorted Darcy with another glance at the magic glass. “I’d
cheerfully stand still and be stuck full of red-hot pins and needles,
if it would make me look like that. I’ll furnish the grit,” she added
confidently, “if you’ll show me how to do the rest.”
There came a gleam into her mentor’s eye that the girl missed. “Very
well,” said Gloria. “Allowing that, let’s make a start. Of all your
little ambitions which one would you like to have fulfilled first?”
The girl pondered. “Dress,” she decided presently. “I want to have
beautiful, thrilling clothes, like a princess.”
“The one princess of my acquaintance,” observed Gloria, “looks as
though she dressed herself backwards out of a mail-order catalogue. But
that’s beside the question. Clothes cost money. How much money have you
got?” Darcy clasped her hands. “I’m rich,” she announced triumphantly.
“How rich?”
“Awfully rich. Two thousand big, round, hard, beautiful dollars. Isn’t
that grand!”
“I don’t know that it’s grand. But it’s good—with care.”
“It’s twice as much as I’ve ever made in a whole year of work on my
silly little wall-paper designs.” Darcy directed a resentful look at
the imitation-leather roll, lying in the corner where she had kicked
it.
“Where did you get it?”
“My blessed old Aunt Sarah wrote it to me.”
“_Wrote_ it? Wrote you two thousand dollars?”
“Yes. Why not? She’d intended to leave it to me when she died. But she
doesn’t feel like dying for a long time yet; so she wrote and said that
she preferred giving it and getting thanked because it was so much,
rather than willing it and getting roasted because it was so little.”
“Sensible auntie! Are you going to be sensible too?”
“How?”
“Put the money in the bank. And forget this experiment.”
Darcy stretched out desperate hands toward the big, blessed mirror.
“And give up _that_ Me?”
“Perhaps you never could be that. It’s only a chance at best.”
“But it _is_ a chance. You said it was a chance yourself.”
“Yes; but—”
“And now are you going to take that away from me?”
Gloria’s eyes were doubtful. “Is it worth two thousand big, round,
hard, beautiful dollars? Just the bare chance of it?”
“Two million,” declared Darcy with impassioned conviction.
“Then you’re determined to be a fool about this?”
“I am.”
Suddenly Gloria seized and hugged her. “If you weren’t, I’d disown you
as a recreant to our sex,” she cried.
“Then you’re going to help me?”
“To the bitter end! First let’s take an inventory. Be a lay figure
again.”
The girl stiffened to attention. Gloria ticked off the points on her
fingers as she talked.
“You’ve got several assets. First, you’re a lady. Nothing to teach
there, and it’s the hardest of all lessons. Second, you’ve got a really
charming voice if you didn’t whine with it. Third, your hair is nice.
But it might as well be stuffing a pillow for all the good you get of
it. Fourth, you’ve got eyes that’d be dangerous if the whites weren’t
yellow. If you’d try wearing your heart in ’em instead of your liver,
they’d do very well. Fifth, the lines of the face—see ‘Life.’ Sixth,
you look as if you were built to be light and strong.”
“I rather like being a dummy,” purred Darcy.
“Wait. The other side of the ledger is coming. You’re going to have a
bad five minutes. Stand up.”
Darcy obeyed.
“Like a camel,” dispassionately commented the actress. “Look in the
glass now,” she ordered.
Darcy looked.
“How d’you like it?” demanded her instructor.
“N—not as well.”
“I should think likely. You lop.”
“I—I can’t help it.”
“Nonsense! You slump.”
Darcy’s lips slackened petulantly down at the corners. Like a flash,
Gloria transfixed the offending mouth with two leveled fingers. “You
peeve,” she accused.
Darcy continued to peeve. Also she sniffled. “Your chin is flabby,”
pursued the inexorable critic. “Your mouth is fishy. Your eyes are
bleary. Your skin is muddy. You walk like a duck, and you stand like a
bag. And if you cry I’ll quit you here, now, and forever.”
With a mighty struggle, Darcy choked back her emotions. “I suppose the
Lord gave me my face,” she defended herself sulkily.
“Don’t libel your Maker. The Lord gave you _a_ face. See Exhibit B.”
“I can’t help it if—”
“Of course you could have helped it! What you’ve done to your face is a
crime, Darcy Cole! You ought to be arrested! Not to mention what you’ve
done to your figure. I shouldn’t be surprised,” she added as the
doorbell rang, “if that were the police now, come to hale you away to
judgment. Sit still,” she commanded as Darcy, suddenly conscious of her
exotic costume, looked about for a way of escape.
The door opened, not to the police, but to a visitor who was presented
to the shrinking Miss Cole as Mr. Thomas Harmon. Mr. Harmon displayed
himself as a stocky man with very cheerful, bright brown eyes,
reassuringly deferential manners, and a curious effect of carrying his
sturdy frame as if it weighed nothing at all. Darcy mentally observed
that he looked as fit in his way as did Gloria in hers. Already she was
beginning to take note of physical condition.
“Have I interrupted a rehearsal?” asked Mr. Harmon.
“No,” said Gloria. “That is, yes.”
“That’s a fair choice,” remarked Mr. Harmon magnanimously. “I’ll take
yes. Am I right, Miss Cole?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’d finished,” murmured Darcy confusedly.
“I’ve promised Mr. Harmon,” Gloria explained, turning to her, “to help
him choose an anniversary present for his sister. It won’t take more
than an hour. Amuse yourself until I come back.”
On the stairway outside, Gloria, intent upon her new purpose, addressed
her companion. “Tom, what do you think of her?”
“Of whom?”
“Little Darcy Cole.”
“Oh”—vaguely—“I don’t know.”
Gloria sighed.
“Why the effect of hopelessness?” inquired Tom Harmon.
“Oh, nothing. Only, you don’t seem to use your eyes much.”
“I was using them to the best of purposes,” declared Mr. Harmon
indignantly. “Considering that I haven’t set them on you for nearly a
month, you can’t expect me to waste time on casual flappers in
fancy-dress costumes. Be fair, Gloria.”
“Darcy isn’t a casual flapper.”
“What is she, then? A coming genius?”
“A reigning beauty and heart-wrecker of the future.”
“Good _Lord!_” said Mr. Harmon with such fervor that Gloria sighed
again.
“Couldn’t you see anything in her, Tom?” she asked appealingly.
“Only the humpy way she wore that costume and the fact that she’d
apparently been crying,” answered Mr. Harmon, who, despite Gloria’s
strictures, was a person not devoid of discernment. “She seemed rather
a mess to me. What’s the idea, Gloria? Anything I can help in?” Gloria
smiled. “It’s like you to want to help. But this is my job. And,” she
added to herself, “it’s going to be a real one.”