Early Saturday morning Jean Caspian sat in her room darning a long “run” in a silk stocking, to the mental accompaniment of her Juliet cues. Suddenly she dropped her work to listen. Some one was running up-stairs at a breakneck speed. Then, simultaneously with a loud bang, her door opened. Clara Coolwood pale and excited, stood panting before her.
“Oh, Jean, isn’t it terrible! I heard it just as soon as I got off the train! It makes me perfectly sick!”
“What?”
“Why—why, Jean—didn’t you know that Guy Norman is dead?”
Jean Caspian jumped to her feet and stared blankly.
“Why, the papers are full of it; he died in Florida yesterday!”
Jean did not answer; she was trembling violently. Gradually her face grew inexplicably empty, as if her stricken soul were receding into some secret refuge, leaving her body to act mechanically. Suddenly she burst into a paroxysm of laughter, loud and strident, void of mirth.
“Well, it’s back to Grandpa Smiley’s, Clara dear,” she chanted hysterically, and with a flippant gesture she chucked Clara under the chin. “Don’t be blue, little girl! Don’t you know that your old friend Smiley is waiting to hear you ask about the baby? Back to the agencies, darling; back ‘from ten till four!’ Four chairs for eighty: six hours to wait. Six hours? Six weeks, six months, six years!”
Her voice ended in a moan, and she fell headlong upon the bed, where she lay, face down, in crumpled folds of lace and velvet and white satin, unconscious.
Clara Coolwood had been schooled and poised by her theatrical experience; she knew every heartbreaking phase of the cruel competition of her profession; she had seen its inevitable disappointments and failures. So up to this moment she had thought she felt the full force of this day’s shock; but it was not until she had drawn the costly white satin ball-gown from under Jean that she began to lose her self-control.