Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/241



Harold had been working in the studio three days in the second week of November. It would be more accurate to say that he had reported for work, had made up and dressed for his part, but he had been kept waiting in his dressing-room, a tiny chamber, separated from the adjoining cubicles by thin walls of rough pine boards, which rose ten feet in the air and then suddenly terminated while yet some appreciable distance from the ceiling. A pine shelf served as a dressing-table, over which hung a mirror, framed in zinc, outlined with a blaze of electric lights. This was one in a long row of similar rooms on the second floor of a mammoth building which looked as if it had been put up over night and which probably could be destroyed by a brisk fire in considerably less time even than that.

A red and white sign vocatively adjured against smoking, and a poster of Zimbule in her costume as the Long Island Phryne, a veil of orange tulle and a rope of pearls, hung on the wall of this room, as it hung, Harold soon discovered, on all the other walls of this vast factory, for factory was what it seemed to him, but he had not yet caught a glimpse