"Yes, and the play is _The Thing_. I am an ugly slaving drudge, but have all the emotions that the sweet _ingenue_ of the piece should have, and the audience watches me deliver. Yes, I've waited long for this, and yet I'm not so glad as I thought I should be. I've been pretty sure of it for the last year or two. I said I was celebrating for two things----" "Pray, what is the other?" "I forget that it might not interest you--though it certainly does me," Selma Cross said with a queer, low laugh.... "He wasn't ugly about it, but he has been exacting--ugh! The fact is, I have earned the privilege at last of sleeping in my own respectable apartment." Paula couldn't help shivering a bit. "You mean you have left your----" "Oh, he wasn't my husband.... It's such a luxury to pay for your own things--for your own house and clothes and dinners--to earn a dollar for every need and one to put away.... You didn't think that I could get my name above the name of a play--without an angel?" "I didn't know," Paula said, "I saw you with him often. It didn't exactly occur to me that he was your husband, because he didn't come here. But do you mean that now when you don't need him any longer--you told him to go away?" "Just that--except it isn't at all as it looks. You wouldn't pity old man Villiers. Living God, that's humorous--after what I have given. Don't look for wings on theatrical angels, dear." It was plain that the woman was utterly tired. She regarded Paula with a queer expression of embarrassment, and there was a look of harsh self-repression under the now-drooped eyelids. "I don't apologize," she went on hastily. "What I have done, I would do again--only earlier in the game, but you're the sort of woman I don't like to have look at me that--I mean look down upon me. I haven't many friends. I think I must be half wild, but you make the grade that I have--and you pay the price.... You've always looked attractive to me--so easy and finished and out of the ruck." There was a real warming sincerity in the words. Paula divined on the instant that she could forever check an intimacy--by a word which would betray the depth of her abhorrence for such a concession to ambition, and for the life which seems to demand it. Selma Cross was sick for a friend, sick from containing herself. On this night of achievement there was something pitiful in the need of her heart. "New York has turned rather too many pages of life before my eyes, Selma, for me to feel far above any one whose struggles I have not endured."