HOPE, which is credited with various magic properties, had kindled a
sickly sort of sub-glow in Darcy Cole’s pasty face as she arrived at
Miss Greene’s address, to keep her appointment. Part of it subsided at
sight of the indication that the elevator was still on strike. The
remainder had vanished long before she had surmounted the four flights
of stairs and stood panting dolorously before Gloria Greene. That
composed person feigned polite surprise.
“Why, what’s the matter, Darcy?”
“Those awful—pouf!—stairs. How—whoof-uff!—d’ you ever—whoo-oo-oof!—do
it?”
“Two steps at a time,” explained the actress practically, “cuts the
distance in half.”
Darcy looked skeptical. “It would kill me,” she declared.
“Very likely, as you are now. We’re going to change all that.”
The gleam returned into Darcy’s big, dull eyes. “Yes?” said she
eagerly. “How?”
“I should say,” answered the actress with a carefully judicial air,
“that you’d better start in by learning to give up.”
“Give up what?”
“Everything that makes life worth living.”
“Is it a joke?” asked Darcy, dubiously. “Far from it. Food, for
instance. You eat too much.”
“Often I don’t get any luncheon at all.”
“And too irregularly,” pursued the accuser. “You drink too much.”
“Gloria! One cocktail before dinner,” was the indignant response.
“And too regularly,” went on the relentless judge. “One is one too many
for a girl with your complexion.”
“Go on,” said Darcy with sullen resignation. “You sleep too much.”
“Eight hours isn’t—”
“You interrupt too much,” broke in the mentor severely. “You laze too
much. You shirk and postpone too much. You nibble too much candy. When
you feel below par you take a pill instead of a walk. Don’t you?”
The girl stared. “How do you know all these things about me?”
“Read ’em in your face, of course. And a lot more, besides.”
“Nobody else ever read ’em there. Not even the doctor.”
“Probably he has, but is too polite to tell you all he sees, or too
cynical to believe that you’d take the trouble to do anything about it
if he told you. Or perhaps he just doesn’t see it.”
“Then how do you?”
“I’m an expert, my dear young innocent. It’s part of my profession to
be good-looking just as it is to keep well-read and well-dressed. And a
lot harder!”
“How can it be harder for you? You’re beautiful just naturally.”
“I’m not beautiful. Your Holcomb Lee or any other artist with a real
eye could reduce my face to a mere scrap-heap of ill-assorted features.
I’m reasonably pleasant to look at because I work hard at the business
of being just that. And I’m going to keep on being pleasant to look at
for twenty good years yet if care and clothes will do it!”
“Clothes help such a lot,” sighed the girl. “When are you going to help
me with mine?”
Gloria Greene looked disparagingly at the girl’s slack and flaccid
body.
“When you develop something to put ’em on,” said she curtly.
“But I thought that if I had some nice clothes—”
“You’d develop inside them like the butterfly in the chrysalis,”
supplemented the other. “Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way with
humans. Didn’t I tell you yesterday that it wasn’t going to be easy?”
“Yes. But you’re not telling me anything now. You’re just—just
discouraging me.”
“Why, you poor-spirited little grub, you haven’t even touched the outer
edge of discouragement yet. Here! Can you do this?” Lifting her hands
high above her glowing head, Gloria swept them down in a long curve of
beauty, until she stood bowed but with unbending knees, her pink
fingers flattened on the floor.
“Of course I can’t,” whined Darcy.
“Try it,” suggested the other enticingly. “It isn’t hard.”
Darcy did not stir. “I’ve got corsets on,” said she.
“You have. Awful ones. Take ’em off.”
“I will,” she promised.
Performance, not promise, was what her instructor demanded. “Do it
now.”
With a sigh, the girl obeyed. “It makes me look sloppier than ever,”
she lamented, glancing toward the mirror.
“Not actually,” was the counsel—of dubious comfort—from the other. “You
only _feel_ now as you’ve been looking all the time. Don’t get another
pair until I tell you. I’ll pick ’em out if you still want them when
Andy Dunne is through with you.”
“Who’s Andy Dunne?”
“Andy,” explained the actress concisely, “is the devil.”
“That’s encouraging,” murmured the girl. “Anyway, you’ll think he is.
He’s my trainer.”
“Trainer! You talk as if you were a prizefighter.”
“I cut Andy’s lip with a straight left once,” said Miss Greene with a
proud, reminiscent gleam in her eye. “It was one of the biggest moments
of my life.”
Taking from her desk the note which she had described to Jacob Remsen
as a commutation ticket to the last station, down-line, she handed it
to Darcy. The girl read it.
Andy: This is Miss Darcy Cole. Put her through as you did me, only
more so.
Gloria Greene
Darcy tucked it carefully into her imitation-leather roll, saying:
“It’s awfully good of you to take all this trouble for me.”
“Oh, it isn’t for you entirely. Call it part of my contribution to the
general welfare. It gives me a pain in my artistic sense to see a
woman-job spoiled; like a good picture daubed over by a bad amateur. So
if I can rescue you as a brand from the burning and put you back on
earth, a presentable human, I’ll feel like a major of the Salvation
Army. That’s why I’ve decided to take you in hand. And may Heaven have
mercy upon your body!”
“Amen!” confirmed Darcy piously, feeling for the introductory note.
“Only,” added Gloria slowly, “I want to be clear on one point. I’d like
to know for whom I’m really doing this.”
“Why, for me, of course,” said Darcy, big-eyed.
“Not for any one else?”
“Who else should there be? I told you there wasn’t any—”
“I know. You swore there was no man in this. Then on top of it, you
rouse my darkest suspicions by acting like a school-girl yesterday and
tearing your hair because the first casual man that comes along doesn’t
gaze soulfully at you when he takes his departure.”
“Gloria, I hate you! D’ you mean Mr. Remsen? Surely you don’t for a
minute imagine—”
“No; I don’t suppose Jack has anything to do with it, personally. But I
seem to get a strong indication of Man as a species somewhere in the
background of this business.”
Pink grew Miss Darcy Cole; then red, and eventually scarlet, under
Gloria’s interested regard.
“You see!” exclaimed that acute person. “Come, now. Explain.”
“It’s—it’s Maud Raines’s fault,” blurted Darcy.
“Agreed that it’s all Maud’s fault. Go on.”
“No; it isn’t _all_ Maud’s fault,” corrected Darcy with a palpable
effort to do exact justice. “It’s partly the British War Office’s
fault.”
“International complications. Maud and the British War Office. Mr. Lee
had better look out!”
“Not at all! It isn’t Maud that the British War Office has been writing
letters to.”
“No? Who is it?”
“Me.”
“Is this a long-distance flirtation with an official Britisher, all
wound round with red tape? What kind of fetters?”
“Well, not personal, exactly,” reluctantly admitted the girl.
“Propaganda matter. It’s sent out by their press bureau. But it always
comes addressed in nice, firm, man-ny handwriting.”
“But why do they send to you?”
Darcy giggled. “That’s the funny part of it. They must have got me
confused with Dorsey Coles, the essayist. He used to live on East
Fifty-Sixth Street.”
“Very likely. When does the Man enter?”
“We-ell, you see, Maud and Helen were awfully curious about my English
correspondent.”
“Naturally.”
“So I—well, I just let ’em be.”
“Is that any reason why you should wear the expression of one about to
confess to a coldblooded murder?”
“Wait. You know I told you Maud had been catty about my sitting to
Holcomb Lee.”
“Yes.”
“This is what I overheard her say to Helen, and I’m not even sure she
didn’t mean me to overhear. She said, ‘Darcy’s been sitting to Holcomb.
Fancy it! Darcy as a model! I can no more imagine her being a model
than I could her being engaged.’ Wasn’t that nasty of her, Gloria!”
“It was. And you very properly smothered her with a pillow as she slept
and have come here to make your confession,” twinkled Gloria.
“Worse,” said Darcy in a small, tremulous voice. “Much worse.”
Gloria sat up straight. “No!” she cried hopefully.
“Yes. For Helen said, ‘Well, somebody in England seems pretty much
interested in her, anyway.’ That’s what put it into my head.”
“I wish you’d put it; into mine,” said the other plaintively. “You
don’t seem to get any nearer the subject of your romance, which is
Man.”
“Well—promise not to laugh at me, Gloria!”
“I’ll try.”
“Just to show ’em both, I got engaged.”
“Darcy!”
“Yes; and one evening when both of the girls were being just a little
extra peacocky over their double wedding next October and letting me
understand what a favor it was to me that I was to be double maid of
honor, I just up and told ’em I didn’t know whether I could be as I had
an important engagement to be married myself.”
“Lovely! Gorgeous!”
“They jumped at the English letters. So I told them that I thought I
might as well own up about the affair; how I’d met him on my vacation
in Canada and helped him try out horses for the British Government,
which had sent him over for that purpose when he was wounded, and we
had corresponded ever since. It was awfully well done, if I do say it
as shouldn’t.”
“Let me get this right,” pleaded Gloria.
“You made him all up yourself, just on the basis of those war-office
letters?”
“N-no. That’s just the trouble.”
“You _didn’t_ make him up?”
“N-n-not entirely.”
“For Heaven’s sake, do be more explicit!”
“I’m t-t-trying to,” said Darcy brokenly. “I got him out of a book.”
“Then he’s imaginary.”
“I’m afraid he’s real. Awfully real.”
“Darcy Cole; _what_ book did you get him out of?”
“Burke’s Peerage.”
With one headlong plunge Gloria projected herself upon the couch where
she wallowed ecstatically among the pillows.
“Oh, Darcy! Darcy!” she gasped when she could achieve coherent speech.
“For this I shall love you forever. I’ll do more. I’ll adopt you. I’ll
endow you. I’ll—I’ll canonize you. What’s his name?”
“Sir Montrose Veyze, Bart., of Veyze Holdings, Hampshire, England,”
recited the girl formally.
Dissociating herself from a convulsed silk coverlet, Gloria
straightened up. “Sir Montrose Veyze,” she repeated thoughtfully and
relishingly. “Why that particular and titled gentleman?”
“I got to the V’s before I found any one that seemed to fill the bill.”
“What special qualification commended him to your favorable
consideration, Miss Cole?”
“Well, he’s unmarried.”
“That’s important.”
“And he’s far away. I came across that in an English magazine.”
“How far?”
“Way out in the East somewhere where one of the fifty-seven varieties
of left-over wars is still going on.”
“So far, so good. What are you going to do with him when he comes
back?”
“If I only knew!” was the miserable rejoinder. “Maybe he won’t come
back. Maybe something will happen to him.”
“It won’t. He’ll bear a charmed life, just to plague you,” retorted her
friend with conviction. “You bloodthirsty little beast!” she added.
“The worst I wish him,” said Darcy tearfully, “is an honorable military
death.”
“Oh! Is that all! You’d have to go into deep mourning.”
“That’d be better than suicide. And I can’t see anything else for me to
do if he lives through. I won’t confess to that Maud-cat! I won’t! I
won’t! I won’t!”
“I don’t blame you. But when are you to be married?”
“Uncertain. That’s the advantage of having a fiancé at war.”
“You must make it after the double wedding,” decided Gloria. “Just for
curiosity, how did you describe him?”
“I’ve rather dodged that, so far. But I think I’d like to have him tall
and slender and with nice, steady, friendly eyes, like Mr. Remsen.”
“So would Monty, doubtless,” surmised Gloria.
“_Who?_”
“Monty Veyze.”
“Gloria! Do you _know_ Sir Montrose Veyze?”
“Rather. I visited at his sister’s last time I was in England.”
“Heavens! That makes it seem so ghastly real. What’s he like?”
“Round and roly-poly and red and fiercelooking; but a good sort. And he
used to be quite an admirer of mine. I do think, Darcy, that with the
whole of Burke’s Peerage to choose from you might have refrained from
trespassing on my preserves. It isn’t clubby of you!”
“You can have him!” cried the girl desperately. “Any one can have him!
I don’t care how round and red and—”
“He’s rather far from your picture of him, certainly. Not a bit like
Jack Remsen. So you approve of Jack, do you?”
“I thought him awfully attractive,” said Darcy shyly.
“Oh, Jack’s a dear. It’s a pity about his money.”
“Has he lost it?”
“No. Got it. Too much. Without it he might make a real actor. He’s the
best amateur in New York to-day. But—an amateur.”
“What does he do?”
“Dabbles in artistic things. And plays at being everybody’s little
sunbeam. Never mind Jack. It’s the imaginary Sir Montrose Veyze that
we’ve got to figure on.”
“Oh, do tell me what to do with him!” implored the too-inventive Darcy.
“Keep him. Prize him above rubies and diamonds. Nothing has given me a
laugh like that for a year.”
“But if—”
“Let the future take care of its ifs. Who can tell what will turn up?
Fate is kind to creative genius. And I’m going to assist Fate if I can.
I’ll make you a bargain, Darcy, for half of your beautiful, inspiring,
heaven-sent lie. You take me into equal partnership in it, and I’ll be
your little personal Guide to Health and Beauty until we’ve made a job
of you. But you’ve got to promise on honor to keep up the Veyze myth,
if I’m to be partner and half owner in it, until I agree to drop it. Is
it a bargain?”
The light of unholy, reckless adventure shot into Darcy’s pale eyes.
“It’s a bargain,” she agreed solemnly.