I confess that Aggie and I were in a state of extreme depression when we left Tish that day. The thought of our dear friend altering the face her Creator gave her was a painful one, and both of us, I think, feared it as an index of a possible general demoralization, as too often happens in the movies. Aggie particularly feared the contacts with men, as mentioned by Hannah, in spite of Tish’s firm attitude. The well-known temptations of Hollywood were in both our minds.
“They aren’t paying her a thousand dollars a week just to ride, and so on,” Aggie said bitterly. “Did you ever see a picture without a love story? It isn’t only her neck she’s risking, Lizzie.”
I must confess to the same uneasiness.
We went to bed early that night, sorely troubled, and I had fallen asleep and was dreaming that Tish was trying to leap from an automobile to a moving train, and that everytime she did it the train jumped to another track, when the telephone bell rang, and it was Hannah. She said that Tish wanted me, and to go over right away, but not to waken Aggie.
I went at once and found all the lights going, and Tish in her bed, bolt upright, with both eyes closed.
“Tish!” I cried. “Your eyes! Can’t you see?”
“Not through my eyelids,” she said witheringly. “Don’t be a fool, Lizzie. Look at this stuff and then tell me what will take it off.”
I then saw that the rims of her eyelids were smeared with a black paste which had hardened like enamel, and that they had become glued together, leaving her, temporarily at least, sightless and helpless. My poor Tish!
“What will take it off?” she demanded. “That idiot Hannah offered to melt it with a burning match.”
“I don’t think anything but a hammer will do any good, Tish.”