“It sounds rather ghastly,” said the other.
“I’ll tell you how it is, there’s such fierce competition in this game, if you’re going to get ahead, nothing else matters, nothing else is real. I know it was that way with me; I hung round the doors of the studios—I was only fifteen—and I starved and yearned, till I’d have slept with the devil to get inside.”
She sat, staring before her, and Bunny, watching her out of the corner of his eye, saw that her face was grim.
“There’s this to remember too,” she added; “a girl meets a man that has a wad of money, and can take her out in a big car, and buy her a good meal, and a lot of pretty clothes, and set her up in a bungalow, and he’s a mighty big man to her, it’s easy to think he’s something wonderful. It’s all right for moralists to sniff, that don’t know anything about it; but the plain truth is, the man that came with the cash and offered me my first real start in a picture—he was just about the same as a god to me, and it was only decent to give him what he wanted. I had to live with him a few months, before I knew he was a fat-headed fool.”
There was a silence. “I suppose,” said Vee, “you’re wondering why I tell you this. I’m safe now, I’ve got some money in the bank, and I might set up for a lady—put on swank and forget the ugly past. If I’d told you I was an innocent virgin, how would you have known? But I said to myself, ‘By God, if having money means anything to me, it means I don’t have to lie any more.’ ”
Said Bunny: “I know a man that says that. It made a great impression on me. I’d never known anybody like it before.”
“Well, it makes you into a kind of savage. I’ve got an awful reputation in the picture world—has anybody told you?”
“Not very much,” he answered.
She looked at him sharply. “What have they told you? All about Robbie Warden, I suppose?”
“Hardly all,” he smiled. “I heard you’d been in love with him, and that you’d sort of been in mourning ever since.”