Part 31

"You'd never know, if you were in the audience, that it wasn't Gray herself. I can take her off to the life, and if the prompter'll stand by--"

He looked at me for a full minute.

"Try it, Olden," he said.

I did. I flew to Gray's dressing-room. She'd gone home deathly ill, of course. They gave me the best seamstress in the place. She let out the waist a bit and pulled over the lace to cover it. I got into that mass of silk and lace--oh, silk on silk, and Nance Olden inside! Beryl Blackburn did my hair, and Grace Weston put on my slippers. Topham, himself, hung me with those gorgeous shining diamonds and pearls and emeralds, till I felt like an idol loaded with booty. There were so many standing round me, rigging me up, that I didn't get a glimpse of the mirror till the second before Ginger called me. But in that second--in that second, Mag Monahan, I saw a fairy with blazing cheeks and shining eyes, with a diamond coronet in her brown hair, puffed high, and pearls on her bare neck and arms, and emeralds over the waist, and rubies and pearls on her fingers, and sprays of diamonds like frost on the lace of her skirt, and diamond buckles on her very slippers, and the rose diamond, like a sun, outshining all the rest; and--and, Mag, it was me!

How did it go? Well, wouldn't it make you think you were a Lady, sure enough, if you couldn't move without that lace train billowing after you; without being dazzled with diamond-shine; without a truly Lord tagging after you?

He kept his head, Lord Harold did--even if it is a mutton-head. That helped me at first. He was so cold, so stupid, so slow, so good-tempered--so just himself. And after the first plunge--

I tell you, Mag Monahan, there's one thing that's stronger than wine to a woman--it's being beautiful. Oh! And I was beautiful. I knew it before I got that quick hush, with the full applause after it. And because I was beautiful, I got saucy, and then calm, and then I caught Fred Obermuller's voice--he had taken the book from the prompter and stood there himself--and after that it was easy sailing.

He was there yet when the act was over, and I trailed out, followed by my Lord. He let the prompt-book fall from his hands and reached them both out to me.

I flirted my jeweled fan at him and swept him a courtesy.

Cool? No, I wasn't. Not a bit of it. He was daffy with the sight of me in all that glory, and I knew it.

"Nance," he whispered, "you wonderful girl, if I didn't know about that little thief up at the Bronsonia I'd--I'd marry you alive, just for the fun of piling pretty things on you."

"The deuce you would!" I sailed past him, with Topham and my Lord in my wake.

They didn't leave me till they'd stripped me clean. I felt like a Christmas tree the day after. But, somehow, I didn't care.

VIII.

Is that you, Mag? Well, it's about time you came home to look after me. Fine chaperon you make, Miss Monahan! Why, didn't I tell you the very day we took this flat what a chaperon was, and that you'd have to be mine? Imagine Nancy Olden without a chaperon--Shocking!

No, 'tisn't late. Sit down, Maggie, there, and let me get the stool and talk to you. Think of us two--Cruelty girls, both of us--two mangy kittens deserted by the old cats in a city's alleys, and left mewing with cold and hunger and dirt, out in the wet--think of us two in our own flat, Mag!

I say, it makes me proud of us! There are times when I look at every stick of furniture we own, and I try to pretend to it all that I'm used to a decent roof over my head, and a dining-room, kitchen, parlor, bedroom and bath. Oh, and I forgot the telephone the other tenant left here till its lease is up. But at other times I stand here in the middle of it and cry out to it, in my heart:

"Look at me, Nancy Olden, a householder, a rent-payer, the head of the family, even if it's only a family of two and the other one Mag! Look at me, with my name in the directory, a-paying milk bills and meat bills and bread bills! Look at me with a place of my own, where nobody's right's greater than my own; where no one has a right but me and Mag; a place where--where there's nothing to hide from the police!"

There's the rub, Mag, as Hamlet says--(I went to see it the other night, so that I could take off the Ophelia--she used to be a good mimic herself, before she tried to be a leading lady.) It spoils you, this sense of safeness that goes with the honesty graft. You lose the quickness of the hunter and the nerve of the hunted. And--worse--you lose your taste for the old risky life. You grow proud and fat, and you love every stick in the dear, quiet little place that's your home--your own home. You love it so that you'd be ashamed to sneak round where it could see you--you who'd always walked upright before it with the step of the mistress; with nothing in the world to be ashamed of; nothing to prevent your staring each honest dish-pan in the face!

And, Mag, you try--if you're me--to fit Tom Dorgan in here--Tom Dorgan in stripes and savage sulks still--all these months--kept away from the world, even the world behind bars! Maggie, don't you wish Tom was a ventriloquist or--or an acrobat or--but this isn't what I had to tell you.

Do you know what a society entertainer is, Miss Monahan? No? Well, look at me. Yes, I'm one. Miss Nance Olden, whose services are worth fifty dollars a night--at least, they were one night.

Ginger brought me the note that made me a society entertainer. It was from a Mrs. Paul B. Gates, who had been "charmed by your clever impersonations, Miss Olden, and write to know if you have the leisure to entertain some friends at my house on Thursday of this week."

Had I the leisure--well, rather! I showed the note to Gray, just to make her jealous. (Oh, yes, she goes on all right in the act with Lord Harold every night. Catch her letting me wear those things of hers twice!) Well, she just turned up her nose.

"Of course, you won't accept?" she said.

"Of course, I will."

"Oh! I only thought you'd feel as I should about appearing before a lot of snobs, who'll treat you like a servant and--"

"Who'll do nothing of the sort and who'll pay you well for it," put in Obermuller. He had come up and was reading the note I had handed to him. "You just say yes, Nance," he went on, after Gray had bounced of to her dressing-room. "It isn't such a bad graft and--and this is just between us two, mind--that little beggar, Tausig, has begun his tricks since you turned his offer down. They can make things hot for me, and if they do, it won't be so bad for you to go in for this sort of thing--unless you go over to the Trust--"

I shook my head.