set; the Steinway
grand piano; the yearly and by no means light tuition toll at Miss
Harperly's Select Day School for Girls.

You get the whimsy of it? For everything fair that was Marcia, Hattie
had brownly paid for. Liltingly, and with the rill of the song of
thanksgiving in her heart.

That was how Hattie moved through her time. Hugging this melody of
Marcia. Through the knife-edged nervous evenings in the theater.
Bawlings. Purple lips with loose muscles crawling under the rouge.
Fetidness of scent on stale bodies. Round faces that could hook into the
look of vultures when the smell of success became as the smell of red
meat. All the petty soiled vanities, like the disordered boudoir of a
cocotte. The perpetual stink of perfume. Powder on the air and caking
the breathing. Open dressing-room doors that should have been closed.
The smelling geometry of the make-up box. Curls. Corsets. Cosmetics. Men
in undershirts, grease-painting. "Gawdalmighty, Tottie, them's my teddy
bears you're puttin' on." Raw nerves. Raw emotions. Ego, the actor's
overtone, abroad everywhere and full of strut. "Overture!" The wait in
the wings. Dizziness at the pit of the stomach. Audiences with lean jaws
etched into darkness. Jaws that can smile or crack your bones and eat
you. Faces swimming in the stage ozone and wolfish for cue. The purple
lips--

Almost like a frieze stuck on to the border of each day was Hattie's
life in the theater. Passementerie.

That was how Hattie treated it. Especially during those placid years of
the phenomenal New York run of "Love Me Long." The outer edge of her
reality. The heart of her reality? Why, the heart of it was the long
morning hours in her own fragrant kitchen over doughnuts boiled in oil
and snowed under in powdered sugar! Cookies that bit with a snap. Filet
of sole boned with fingers deft at it and served with a merest fluff of
tartar sauce. Marcia ate like that. Preciously. Pecksniffily. An egg at
breakfast a gag to the sensibilities! So Hattie ate hers in the kitchen,
standing, and tucked the shell out of sight, wrapped in a lettuce leaf.
Beefsteak, for instance, sickened Marcia, because there was blood in the
ooze of its juices. But Hattie had a sly way of camouflage. Filet
mignon (so strengthening, you see) crushed under a little millinery of
mushrooms and served under glass. Then when Marcia's neat little row of
neat little teeth bit in and the munch began behind clean and careful
lips, Ha