Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/25

Rh man with the three-carat diamond in the Asteroid Theater Building. He had told me that if I "fleshed up" he thought he could place me in a road company at twenty dollars a week. That was earlier in the year, when, like about every other empty-headed girl out of work, I considered the possibility of stepping up into stage work, very much the same as you step into an air-ship, and floating off among the stars that spell their own names to the skies in colored electric bulbs.

But I hadn't "fleshed up." The hot weather and the worry of it all, in fact, had left me as thin as a rail, and often, in the elevator mirrors, I grimly asked myself why somebody didn't mistake me for the poison label on a medicine bottle. One thing, however, I still possessed. And that was the ironically well-tailored raiment in which the Locke office had togged me out. Those clothes, I knew, would have to take the place of the back pay which the Chief would never now surrender. And fine feathers, I also knew, usually made fine birds. So then and there I decided to go back to the three-carat diamond man and ask him to reopen that road-company offer. For above all things I was afraid of idleness. I was nothing but a sort of human whip-top, and unless something kept me on the move, al-