The gloom of back-stage was as high as trees and Hattie had not seen him in sixteen years. But she knew. With the stunned consciousness of a stabbed person that glinting instant before the blood begins to flow. It was Morton Sebree--Marcia's father. "Morton!" "Hattie." "Come up to my dressing room," she said, as matter-of-factly as if her brain were a clock ticking off the words. They walked up an iron staircase of unreality. Fantastic stairs. Wisps of gloom. Singing pains in her climbing legs like a piano key hit very hard and held down with a pressing forefinger. She could listen to her pain. That was her thought as she climbed. How the irrelevant little ideas would slide about in her sudden chaos. She must concentrate now. Terribly. Morton was back. His hand, a smooth glabrous one full of clutch, riding up the banister. It could have been picked off, finger by finger. It was that kind of a hand. But after each lift, another finger would have curled back again. Morton's hand, ascending the dark like a soul on a string in a burlesque show. Face to face. The electric bulb in her dressing room was incased in a wire like a baseball mask. A burning prison of light. Fat sticks of grease paint with the grain of Hattie's flesh printed on the daub end. Furiously brown cheesecloth. An open jar of cream (chocolate) with the gesture of the gouge in it. A woolly black wig on a shelf, its kinks seeming to crawl. There was a rim of Hattie _au natural_ left around her lips. It made of her mouth a comedy blubber, her own rather firm lips sliding about somewhere in the lightish swamp. That was all of Hattie that looked out. Except her eyes. They were good gray eyes with popping whites now, because of a trick of blackening the lids. But the irises were in their pools, inviolate. "Well, Hattie, I reckon I'd have known you even under black." "I thought you were in Rio." "Got to hankering after the States, Hattie." "I read of a Morris Sebree died in Brazil. Sometimes I used to think maybe it might have been a misprint--and--that--you--were--the--one." "No, no. 'Live and kickin'. Been up around here a good while." "Where?" "Home. N'Orleans. M' mother died, Hattie, God rest her bones. Know it?" "No." "Cancer." It was a peculiar silence. A terrible word like that was almost slowly soluble in it. Gurgling down. "O-oh!" "Sort of gives a fellow the shivers, Hattie, seeing you kinda hidin' behind yourself like this. But I saw you come in the theater to-night. You looked right natural. Little heavier." "What do you want?" "Why, I guess a good many things in general and nothing in particular, as the sayin' goes. You don't seem right glad to see me, honey." "Glad!" said Hattie, and laughed as if her mirth were a dice shaking in a box of echoes. "Your hair's right red yet. Looked mighty natural walkin' into the theater to-night. Take off those kinks, honey." She reached for her cleansing cream, then stopped, her eyes full of the foment of torture.