It was gratifying in the first place to enter the door marked "Stage" with a supplementary legend, NO ADMITTANCE, and pass the old doorkeeper who knew and liked her. The dark passages beyond, smelling of escaping gas and damp straw, of unaired rooms and plumbing and fresh paint, were perfumed with romance to her, as were the little dressing rooms with old photographs stuck in the loosened wallpaper and dim initials scratched on the bare walls, and odd wigs and scarfs and paint jars littering the shelves. Wallace making up his face was an exalted being in the eyes of his wife. When the play began, she took her station in the wings--silent, unobtrusive, eager to keep out of everybody's way, eager not to miss a word of the play. The man over her head, busy with his lights; the one or two shirt-sleeved, elderly men who invariably stood dispassionately watching the performance; the stage-hands; the various members of the cast: for all these she had a smile, and their answering smiles were Martie's delight. "Take off ten pounds, Martie, and Bellew will give you a show some time!" said Maybelle La Rue, who was Mabel Cluett in private life. Martie gasped at the mere thought. She determined to diet. A few months before, she had supposed that social intercourse was a large factor in the actor's life, that midnight suppers were shared by the cast, and that intimacy of an unconventional if harmless nature reigned among them. Now, with some surprise, she learned that this was not the case. The actors, leaving the play at different moments, quietly got into their street clothes and disappeared; so that Mabel and Wallace, usually holding the stage for the last few moments by reason of their respective parts of maid and lover, often left a theatre empty of performers except for themselves. Jesse would frequently reach home enough earlier to be sound asleep when his wife rushed in to seize her hungry and fretting baby. Little Leroy spent the early evening in Martie's bed; one of the maids in the house being paid in Mabel's old finery for coming to look at the children now and then. At intervals the Bannisters and the Cluetts did have little after-theatre suppers, but Martie was heroically dieting, Mabel tired and sleepy, and both gentlemen somewhat subject to indigestion. So Martie and Wallace more often went alone, Martie drinking bouillon and nibbling a cracker, and her husband devouring large orders of coffee and scrambled eggs. They had been married perhaps eight weeks when Wallace astonished her by drinking too much. She had always fancied herself too broad-minded to resent this in the usual wifely way, but the fact angered her, and she suffered over the incident for days.