The fellows who buy wine and eat terrapin at their midnight lunches—I ought to say dinners—had found a new attraction, and for a brief while she was the idol of the hour. But the trouble with these idols is that they don’t last, and the finish as a rule is very disheartening, and in many cases pathetic.
Of course, every once in a while a wise one will come to the front who will do a little bookkeeping with herself, and when the smoke of battle will have cleared away she finds she has enough to tell everybody to go to blazes if she cares to be rude.
But that is the exception rather than the rule. Quick money, you know, is like a dream, in that it only lasts while you are asleep. You think you are in a mansion, and when the knock comes on the door you discover that you are in the same old hall bedroom, and realize that you have to get up just as you have been doing all your life, and work ten hours a day—or eight, as the case may be—in order to get enough money to pay what you owe.
The girl that all the bloods were buying dinners and flowers for came from the West not so very long ago, and she didn’t leave any of her good looks behind her, either. She hit the town with a dress suit case, a good complexion and a taking way with the boys, and that’s all the capital any skirt wearer needs in Gotham if she is only introduced to the right crowd of spenders
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 and keeps away from the pikers who have their bank rolls lashed to the mast or bottled up so tight that when they do release a bill it smells like an Egyptian mummy which has been packed in a vault since the time of Pharaoh.
 
She put herself up at auction and was promptly bid on
This lady hit the trail which led to the show houses. She had no idea that she was an Adelina Patti or a Sarah Bernhardt, but she knew she could carry a spear as good as any old-timer, and she was prepared to make good.
“Got a job for me?” she asked the first stage manager she happened to run across.
He looked her over and then remarked casually:
“I don’t think so, for all the star parts are given out for the season, but you might go over and see Frohman and ask him if you can’t understudy Maude Adams.”
“Don’t strain your voice on my account,” she said, by way of a come-back. “I’m looking for about $18 a week in the line-up, and when it comes to tights, I guess there ain’t any of them who has anything on me. You had me flagged for a Sis Hopkins, but you want to throw some sand on the track because you’re sliding. I don’t sit up at night reading Romeo and Juliet, and where I come from they think Shakespeare is a new kind of breakfast food. Can you get busy now?”
“I guess I’ll have to if I want to get rid of you.”
“Well, you’re learning, and that’s a good sign.”
So after he had looked her over again very carefully, he concluded she’d do for the chorus for a starter anyhow.
A stage manager who is used to hiring ladies whose talents lie in their legs has a system of his own in picking
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 out good ones that don’t need padding, and he never makes a mistake any more than a red squirrel will stow away a bad nut for the winter. Face, neck, hands and arms tell the story and they never fail, and so he knew she could wear the usual size, and if anything stretch them a bit.
That was the beginning.
One night four young men about town sat in a theatre box watching the merry maidens tropping on and telling in song how happy they were that the Princess was going to be married to the poor but handsome gink whose father had a cobbler’s shop one block from the palace.
“Get onto the curves of the girl with the black hair,” said one, and in a minute there were four pairs of eyes looking at one pair of silk tights.
“Great,” said another, enthusiastically.
“Who is she?” asked a third. “I never saw her before.”
“Well, Ben certainly has an eye for beauty. I wonder where he gets them? Let’s see him and ask him to put us on, for she’s all right.”
Incidentally, Ben was the first name of the stage manager.
It isn’t necessary to go into details, for general results save a lot of time, but a couple of hours later four enthusiastic young fellows and a dimpled brunette sat at a round table in a sporty cafe, and when any of them wanted to address her they called her Curves.
“What are you trying to do?” she asked, when it was first sprung, “give me a nickname?”
“No,” was the answer, “simply a trademark.”
And they all understood.
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So because of that she began her career with the world by the tail on a downhill pull.
Not to know Curves and have her call you by your first name when you met was to be the deadest kind of a dead one, and the witty stories she could tell over a quart of wine soon began to be circulated around town.
As is often the case, women were her enemies and men were her friends, and she slid along in a happy-go-lucky way, letting the morrow take care of itself.
There was no question but that her figure was the making of her, just as Jennie Joyce’s legs made her famous from one end of the country to the other when she was a reigning favorite at Koster & Bial’s old place on Twenty-third street two decades ago.
The photographer who secured some good poses of Curves in tights found himself busy printing them to supply the demand, and it was as easy to get her before a camera as it was to get a kid to a candy store. If she had received a dollar for every time she wrote across the bottom of one of her photographs “Sincerely yours, Curves,” she would have had a bank account that would have been broad, wide and deep. But she was simply a good fellow and she made no attempt to live by her wits. Like many another poor devil, she probably thought she would always be young, good-looking and popular. She didn’t know that those whom the public applauds to-day it kills to-morrow, and that it takes but a week in New York to make a favorite less than a memory.
But there was one incident in her career that stands out in relief from anything of the kind that anyone had ever done before, and it is worth telling. It was
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 characteristic of her to do a thing of this sort, and she w............