When she threw off her veil and hat, you saw a pretty enough face, now flushed and disturbed by some unusual emotion, and restless, large eyes with discontent marring their brightness.  A heavy pile of dull auburn hair, hastily put up, was escaping in crinkly, waving strands and curling, small locks from the confining combs and pins.

The meeting of the two was not marked by the effusion vocal, gymnastical, osculatory and catechetical that distinguishes the greetings of their unprofessional sisters in society.  There was a brief clinch, two simultaneous labial dabs and they stood on the same footing of the old days.  Very much like the short salutations of soldiers or of travellers in foreign wilds are the welcomes between the strollers at the corners of their criss-cross roads.

“I’ve got the hall-room two flights up above yours,” said Rosalie, “but I came straight to see you before going up.  I didn’t know you were here till they told me.”

“I’ve been in since the last of April,” said Lynnette.  “And I’m going on the road with a ‘Fatal Inheritance’ company.  We open next week in Elizabeth.  I thought you’d quit the stage, Lee.  Tell me about yourself.”

Rosalie settled herself with a skilful wriggle on the top of Miss D’Armande’s wardrobe trunk, and leaned her head against the papered wall.  From long habit, thus can peripatetic leading ladies and their sisters make themselves as comfortable as though the deepest armchairs embraced them.

“I’m going to tell you, Lynn,” she said, with a strangely sardonic and yet carelessly resigned look on her youthful face.  “And then to-morrow I’ll strike the old Broadway trail again, and wear some more paint off the chairs in the agents’ offices.  If anybody had told me any time in the last three months up to four o’clock this afternoon that I’d ever listen to that ‘Leave-your-name-and-address’ rot of the booking bunch again, I’d have given ’em the real Mrs. Fiske laugh.  Loan me a handkerchief, Lynn.  Gee! but those Long Island trains are fierce.  I’ve got enough soft-coal cinders on my face to go on and play Topsy without using the cork.  And, speaking of corks—­ got anything to drink, Lynn?”

Miss D’Armande opened a door of the wash-stand and took out a bottle.

“There’s nearly a pint of Manhattan.  There’s a cluster of carnations in the drinking glass, but—­”

“Oh, pass the bottle.  Save the glass for company.  Thanks!  That hits the spot.  The same to you.  My first drink in three months!

“Yes, Lynn, I quit the stage at the end of last season.  I quit it because I was sick of the life.  And especially because my heart and soul were sick of men—­of the kind of men we stage people have to be up against.  You know what the game is to us—­it’s a fight against ’em all the way down the line from the manager who wants us to try his new motor-car to the bill-posters who want to call us by our front names.