[252]
] The girl’s lips opened, then shut tight. She had told them where the ring came from—and they didn’t believe her. Besides, if she tried to answer them she’d cry, and she’d die rather than let them see her do that! It was the same struggle she went through every night and two matinées a week—sometimes with bravado, more often in choking silence. Somehow they made her ashamed, those two, that for her the apple still hung high on the tree. If they wanted to think some man had given her the diamond, so much the better! It would make her seem popular—less a little fool!
She downed the tears by vigorous motion.... She sprang up—a kick of her heel sent her chair spinning—and ripping open her one-piece serge dress, she tossed it on the hook in the wall where hung a plain brown ulster and imitation seal turban—alley cat caught in the rain, Miss Mariette had christened it. Then she gritted her teeth, pulled the chair back into place and slashed on make-up.
Sallie MacMahon, listed in chorus annals as Zara May, was one of those who merited the splashing announcement of the red posters. Perhaps it was her long mermaid hair with its glisten of sunset on the sea; perhaps the fact that the lashes shading her deep blue eyes were the same gold; perhaps the transparent quality of her skin with the swift play of young blood under the surface; but whatever it was, Sallie’s beauty held a luminous quality Sallie herself did not possess. Sallie was just a girl, with a facility for doing what she was told. The daughter of a Scotch father with somber eyes and an Irish mother with laughing ones, both of [253] ]whom had sailed the misty river into unknown lands after a stormy sojourn together in this one, she had been left at fifteen to take care of herself, with a love of the beautiful on one hand warring against a sense of economy on the other.
Sallie loved soft furs and clinging silks such as swept into the chorus dressing-room nightly. But she had no desire to follow the tortuous path by which such luxuries are achieved. However, the fact that the Mallard girl and Grace assumed she had done so, did not at all disturb her. It was their ridicule she feared, their jibes at her clothes. Speeding across the stone floor under the Summer Garden stage she tried to bring a smile to her lips. They merely trembled.
There came the march of a military air and the girls filed up the wobbly wooden steps and through a trap door. Sallie fluffed up her abbreviated skirt, brought the smile to her lips, fixed it as if it had been glued there. Her young, elastic body rippled through the number under the changing lights. She loved the jazz, loved the stir of rhythm, and had it not been for the ache in her heart whenever she set foot in the theater, she would have loved the work. She was nineteen. Music was in her blood.
She danced through the varying scenes with swift changes of costume, hurried dabs of powder, and little time to nurse her woes. A number toward the end of Act II was her favorite. It was the one in which the girls trooped down the runway and trilled to some not always embarrassed male occupant of an aisle seat:—
“Oh-oh-oh-oh-h-h-h-h—[254]
]
Won’t you—smile at me?”
Often as she swayed through it, it never failed to give her a thrill. Likewise she never failed to get what she demanded.
To-night, as she syncopated down the aisle, a light like blue fire darted from her deep eyes. Kindled by the smouldering defiance of earlier evening it was utterly unconscious of seeking an object. But the gentleman in the particular seat that was her territory could scarcely have been expected to know that. To him it constituted challenge.