self that "rue" was not the only thing that
could be so treated, since we all had rouge upon our cheeks; yet
Semantha--ah, God forgive her--wore her rouge with a difference.

A little longer and we were all in Columbus, where a portion of each
season was passed, our manager keeping his company there during the
sitting of the legislature. We had secured boarding-houses,--the memory
of mine will never die,--and in fact our round bodies were beginning to
fit themselves to the square holes they were expected to fill for the
next few weeks, when we found ourselves sneezing and coughing our way
through that spirit-crushing thing they call a "February thaw."
Rehearsal had been long, and I was tired. I had quite a distance to
walk, and my mind was full of professional woe. Here was I, a ballet
girl who had taken a cold whose proportions simply towered over that
nursed by the leading lady's self; and as I slipped and slid slushily
homeward, I asked myself angrily what a fairy was to do with a
handkerchief,--and in heaven's name, what was that fairy to do without
one. The dresses worn by fairies--theatrical, of course--in those days
would seem something like a fairy mother-hubbard now, at all events a
home toilet of some sort, so very proper were they; but even so there
was no provision made for handkerchiefs, no thought apparently that
stage fairies might have colds in their star-crowned heads.

So as my wet skirt viciously slapped my icy ankles, I almost tearfully
declared to myself I would have to have a handkerchief, even though it
wore pinned to my wings, only who on earth could get it off in time for
me to use? Now if poor Semantha were only--and there I stopped, my eyes,
my mind, fixed upon a woman a little way ahead of me, who stood staring
in a window. Her figure drooped as though she were weary or very, very
sad, and I said to myself, "I don't know what you are looking at, but I
_do_ know it's something you want awfully," and just then she turned and
faced me. My heart gave a plunge against my side. I knew her. One
woman's glance, lightning-quick, mathematically true, and I had her
photograph--the last, the very last I ever took of poor Semantha.

As her eyes met mine, they opened wide and bright. The rosy colour
flushed into her face, her lips smiled. She gave a little forward
movement, then before I had completed calling out her name, like a flash
she changed, her brows were knit, her lips close-pressed, and all her