Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/247

 in a tent. She had been wild to get back to civilization. It had been their first moment of disillusion.

She showed him before he went some of the things she had acquired since his last visit—an ermine coat, a string of pearls.

"I saw them in your last picture," he told her. "You really visit me by proxy. I find your name on the boards, and walk in with a lot of other men and look at you. And not one of them dreams that I've ever seen the woman on the screen."

"Well, they wouldn't of course." She had never taken his name. Her own was too valuable.

When he told her good-bye he asked a question: "Are you happy?"

For a moment her face clouded. "I'm not quite sure. Is anybody? But I like the way I am living, Ollie."

He had a sense of relief. "So do I," he said. "I earn fifteen dollars a week. The papers say that you earn fifteen hundred—and you're not quite twenty."

"There isn't a man in this hotel that makes so much," she told him complacently. "The women try to snub me, but they can't. Money talks."

It seemed to him that in her case it shouted. As he rode back on Mary Pick he thought seriously of his fifteen dollars a week and her fifteen hundred; 241