in India or
Egypt maybe).

Yes, she was already all made up. This time she'd been going extra
heavy on the burrowing-into-character bit, I could tell right away,
even if it was only for a hacked-out anachronistic prologue. She
signed to me to help her dress without even looking at me, but as I
got busy I looked at _her_ eyes. They were so cold and sad and lonely
(maybe because they were so far away from her eyebrows and temples and
small tight mouth, and so shut away from each other by that ridge of
nose) that I got the creeps. Then she began to murmur and sigh, very
softly at first, then loudly enough so I got the sense of it.

"Cold, so cold," she said, still seeing things far away though her
hands were working smoothly with mine. "Even a gallop hardly fires my
blood. Never was such a Januarius, though there's no snow. Snow will
not come, or tears. Yet my brain burns with the thought of Mary's
death-warrant unsigned. There's my particular hell!--to doom,
perchance, all future queens, or leave a hole for the Spaniard and the
Pope to creep like old worms back into the sweet apple of England.
Philip's tall black crooked ships massing like sea-going fortresses
south-away--cragged castles set to march into the waves. Parma in the
Lowlands! And all the while my bright young idiot gentlemen spurting
out my treasure as if it were so much water, as if gold pieces were a
glut of summer posies. Oh, alackanight!"

And I thought, _Cry Iced!--that's sure going to be one tyrannosaur of
a prologue. And how you'll ever shift back to being Lady Mack beats
me. Greta, if this is what it takes to do just a bit part, you'd
better give up your secret ambition of playing walk-ons some day when
your nerves heal._

* * * * *

She was really getting to me, you see, with that characterization. It
was as if I'd managed to go out and take a walk and sat down in the
park outside and heard the President talking to himself about the
chances of war with Russia and realized he'd sat down on a bench with
its back to mine and only a bush between. You see, here we were, two
females undignifiedly twisted together, at the moment getting her into
that crazy crouch-deep bodice that's like a big icecream cone, and yet
here at the same time was Queen Elizabeth the First of England, three
hundred and umpty-ump years dead, coming back to life in a Central
Park dressing room. It shook me.

She looked so much the part, you see