Suddenly Kedzie stopped purring, thought fiercely, whirled to her flank; her hands went among the papers. She remembered something, found it at last, an article she had glanced at and forgotten for the moment. She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning powers of several film queens. It credited them with salaries ten or twenty times as much as hers. Two or three of them had companies of their own with their names at the head of their films. Kedzie groaned. She rose and paced the floor, shamed, trapped, humbled. The misers of the Hyperfilm Company paid her a beggarly hundred dollars a week! merely featured her among other stars of greater magnitude, while certain women had two thousand a week and were “incorporated,” whatever that was! Kedzie longed to get at Ferriday and tell him what a sneak he was to lure her into such a web and tie her up with such cheap ropes. She would break her bonds and fling them in his face. She slid abruptly to the floor and began to go over the film pages again, comparing her portraits with the portraits of those higher-paid creatures. She hated vanity and could not endure it in other women; it was a mere observation of a self-evident fact that she was prettier than all the other film queens put together. She sat there sneering at the presumptuousness of screen idols whom she had almost literally worshiped a year before. Then something gave her pause. The celluloid-queens had certain pages allotted to them, the actresses certain pages. But there was another realm where women were portrayed in fashionable gowns--debutantes, brides, matrons. And their realm was called “The Social World.” These women toiled not, earned not; they only spent money and time as they pleased. They were in “society,” and she was out of it. They were ladies and she was a working-woman. Now Kedzie's cake was dough indeed. Now her pride was shame. She did not want to be a film queen. She did not want to work for any sum a week. She wanted to be a debutante and a bride and a matron. She had never had a coming-out party, and never would have. She studied the aristocrats, put their portraits on her dressing-table and tried to copy their simple grandeur in her mirror. But she lacked a certain something. She didn't know a human being who was swell to use as a model. Oh yes, she did--one--Jim Dyckman. A dark design came to her to dally with him no longer. He had dragged her out of that pool at Newport; now he must drag her into the swim. The telephone-bell rang. The hall-boy said: “A gen'leman to see you--Mistoo Ferriday.” “Send him along.” “He's on the way now.” “Oh, all right.” As Kedzie hung up the receiver it occurred to her that this little interchange was about the un-swellest thing she had ever done. She had been heedless of the convenances. Her business life made her responsible only to herself, and she felt able to take care of herself anywhere.