[127]
]GREASE-PAINT
CHAPTER I
She had weary eyes—eyes with the weight of centuries of knowledge upon them—eyes that could no longer open wide with astonishment at anything life might hold. The lashes were so long, so dark and straight that they were like a veil of night shadowing the grayness beneath. Her gaze came through, inviting you to penetrate, urging you by its very weariness to try to read the story those eyes might tell.
A slow smile lifted the corners of her mouth, then let them droop before the smile was really born. Her walk as she trailed from the first line of show girls in her wide-spread bird of paradise costume was as measured as the muse of tragedy.
And yet she was only twenty-six.
That was Naomi Stokes, who counted numberless acquaintances but few friends; who knew many men better than they cared to be known but few as well as she might have cared to know them.
Broadway was a playground to Naomi but she had long since learned that in the game played there, none are winners. Time is the croupier who rakes in the spoils and at Time Naomi had ceased to smile even wearily. He stood with his long arm suspended, ready, it seemed to her, to pounce upon each hour she might hold dear, jealous of all she had crowded into one short life. Man she knew too well to fear but the croupier with whom she had gambled so long, she dared not look in [128] ]the face. And as one sings in the dark to silence fear, so she had developed a philosophy of life which she held close in those moments when she might be tempted to take measure of things. She could not afford to pause long nor to think much.
Of that glittering section which stretches like some bejeweled recumbent queen of the night from Forty-second to Fiftieth Streets, Naomi was such an integral part that if a night passed without her appearance at one or another of the tightly wedged restaurants, their habitués wondered. When she moved between rows of tables with her long-lashed smile sweeping with lazy insolence the whole room, those who did not know asked who she was. Her name—in the theater merely that of another show girl—had for so long swung from lip to lip in the after-theater life of the White Way that soon it would of necessity be relegated to that past which hangs so cruelly over the present.
Naomi knew this. And more than once, alone in her tiny two-room apartment and in spite of her philosophy, she wondered what would come after. A shrug avails little in the midday glare of reality.
It was on a night following such a day—when the dregs of life had tasted particularly bitter—that Naomi and four others went to supper with Marshall Kent.