Jerry’s red lips curved into a grin. Ordinarily, when Jerry laughed, one thought of the wine of good-fellowship, and the spirit of youth that knows no age, but this time one was uncomfortably conscious of the redness and wideness of her lips, which seemed to stretch into the grin of a street urchin. There was a gamin echo to her short, faint laugh, as she threw the sewing things back into their box. “I used to do—a lot of sewing. Come on and let me daub your face up.” The intoxication of make-up is an insidious vintage known to more girls than mere man can ever believe. Few are they who, having seen themselves glorified by the art of rabbit’s foot and cunning pencil, which presents those too-familiar features in a new, glowing charm, can resist waving the fairy wand again and yet again, until experiment becomes deep-seated habit. Joy did not know, as Jerry set to work upon her, how she was going to come to depend on the fairy wand. As she worked, Jerry threw out words of wisdom. “The whole point is to get everything so _you_ think it’s slightly underdone. It never will be. And otherwise someone always spots it, and then you never get credit for anything.” When she was completed, Jerry pushed her to the mirror and then stood, hands on hips, surveying her work. Joy was dumb. From the chill white of her dress came the warm white of her shoulders, skilfully dusted with some Phantom powder; and from all this neutral colour flashed the vividness of her face. Her cheeks were a rich rose; the blue of her eyes was darkened and intensified, her lashes sweeping over them, black and long. Her lips were a blazing scarlet, shaped in a perfect Cupid’s bow. They fascinated her. She could not look at her hair, nor her eyes, nor her dress, very long; she had to look at those lips. They seemed almost sinful. It didn’t seem right that lips should be so red. “Well, Angel of Joy—have you fallen in love with yourself?” Jerry demanded. Joy wet her lips, then remembered that they were painted, and was completely at a loss. “I—I certainly look—much better. But somehow I don’t like the idea.” “Why not?” Sarah snapped, rubbing off a little of her bloom on one side. She did not appear to be especially pleased with Joy’s transformation. “Well—somehow—you know, bad women and everything use paint and this stuff so much——” “They put it on raw,” panted Jerry, who now in one short moment had slipped on her scanty evening dress and was jumping into her stockings. “Nine-tenths of the rest of us try to be artistic about it.” “But you—_you_ don’t use it, do you, Jerry?” Again the gamin grin, as Jerry stamped on her slippers and raked her hair through with a comb. “No, it’s not my style. But I used to do—a lot of making-up.”