ttie's heart, a regular old bandit for cunning, beat hoppity,
skippity, jump!

Those were her realities. Home. The new sandwich cutters. Heart shape.
Diamond shape. Spade. The strip of hall carpet newly discovered to scour
like new with brush and soap and warm water. Epstein's meat market
throws in free suet. The lamp with the opal-silk shade for Marcia's
piano. White oilcloth is cleaner than shelf paper. Dotted Swiss
curtains, the ones in Marcia's room looped back with pink bows. Old
sashes, pressed out and fringed at the edges.

And if you think that Hattie's six rooms and bath and sunny, full-sized
kitchen, on Morningside Heights, were trumped-up ones of the press agent
for the Sunday Supplement, look in.

Any afternoon. Tuesday, say, and Marcia just home from school. On
Tuesday afternoon of every other week Hattie made her cream, in a large
copper pot that hung under the sink. Six dozen half-pint jars waiting
to be filled with Brown Cold Cream. One hundred and forty-four jars
a month. Guaranteed Color-fast. Mulatto, Medium, Chocolate. Labeled.
Sealed. Sold. And demand exceeding the supply. An ingratiating, expert
cream, known the black-faced world over. It slid into the skin, not
sootily, but illuminating it to winking, African copper. For instance,
Hattie's make-up cream for Linda in "Love Me Long" was labeled
"Chocolate." But it worked in even a truer brown, as if it had come out
of the pigment instead of gone into the pores.

Four hours of stirring it took, adding with exact minutiae the
mysteriously proper proportions of spermacetti, oil of sweet almonds,
white wax--But never mind. Hattie's dark secret was her own.

Fourteen years of her black art as Broadway's maid _de luxe_ had been
her laboratory. It was almost her boast now--remember the sunken
headstones--that she had handled spotlessly every fair young star of the
theaters' last ten years.

It was as mysterious as pigment, her cream, and as true, and netted
her, with occasional extra batches, an average of two hundred dollars a
month. She enjoyed making it. Singing as she stirred or rather stirring
as she sang, the plenitude of her figure enveloped in a blue-and-white
bungalow apron with rickrack trimming.

Often Marcia, home from day school, watched. Propped up in the window
frame with her pet cat, a Persian, with eyes like swimming pools with
painted green bottoms, seated in a perfect circle in her quiet lap,
for all the world in the attitude of