She paraded,
jauntily switching her great hips and laughing. "Jealous!" she
teased. "You poor little broomstick."
Burlingham was in a white flannel suit that looked well enough
in those dim lights. The make-up gave him an air of rakish
youth. Eshwell had got himself into an ordinary sack suit.
Tempest was in the tattered and dirty finery of a
seventeenth-century courtier. The paint and black made Eshwell's
face fat and comic; it gave Tempest distinction, made his hollow
blazing eyes brilliant and large. All traces of habitation were
effaced from the "auditorium"; the lamps were lighted, a ticket
box was set up on the rear deck and an iron bar was thrown half
across the rear entrance to the cabin, that only one person at
a time might be able to pass. The curtain was let down--a gaudy
smear of a garden scene in a French palace in the eighteenth
century. Pat, the orchestra, put on a dress coat and vest and
a "dickey"; the coat had white celluloid cuffs pinned in the
sleeves at the wrists.
As it was still fully an hour and a half from dark, Susan hid on
the stage; when it should be time for the curtain to go up she
would retreat to the dressing-room. Through a peephole in the
curtain she admired the auditorium; and it did look surprisingly
well by lamplight, with the smutches and faded spots on its
bright paint softened or concealed. "How many will it hold?" she
asked Mabel, who was walking up and down, carrying her long train.
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