"You would show up well in those things," Violet said to her, "that is, for a thin woman. The men don't care much for thinness." "Not the clodhoppers and roustabouts that come to see us," retorted Mabel. "The more a woman looks like a cow or a sow, the better they like it. They don't believe it's female unless it looks like what they're used to in the barnyard and the cattle pen." Miss Anstruther was not in the least offended. 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. "A hundred and twenty comfortably," replied Miss Connemora. "A hundred and fifty crowded. It has held as high as thirty dollars, but we'll be lucky if we get fifteen tonight." Susan glanced round at her. She was smoking a cigarette, handling it like a man. Susan's expression was so curious that Mabel laughed. Susan, distressed, cried: "I'm sorry if--if I was impolite." "Oh, you couldn't be impolite," said Mabel. "You've got that to learn, too--and mighty important it is. We all smoke. Why not? We got out of cigarettes, but Bob bought a stock this afternoon."