The leading lady lay on her bed and wept. Not as you have seen leading ladies weep, becomingly, with eyebrows pathetically V-shaped, mouth quivering, sequined bosom heaving. The leading lady lay on her bed in a red-and-blue-striped kimono and wept as a woman weeps, her head burrowing into the depths of the lumpy hotel pillow, her teeth biting the pillow-case to choke back the sounds so that the grouch in the next room might not hear.

Presently the leading lady\'s right hand began to grope about on the bedspread for her handkerchief. Failing to find it, she sat up wearily, raising herself on one elbow and pushing her hair back from her forehead—not as you have seen a leading lady pass a lily hand across her alabaster brow, but as a heart-sick woman does it. Her tears and sniffles had formed a little oasis of moisture on the pillow\'s white bosom so that the ugly stripe of the ticking showed through. She gazed down at the damp circle with smarting, swollen eyes, and another lump came up into her throat.

Then she sat up resolutely, and looked about her. The leading lady had a large and saving sense of humor. But there is nothing that blunts the sense of humor more quickly than a few months of one-night stands. Even O. Henry could have seen nothing funny about that room.

The bed was of green enamel, with fly-specked gold trimmings. It looked like a huge frog. The wall-paper was a crime. It represented an army of tan mustard plasters climbing up a chocolate-fudge wall. The leading lady was conscious of a feeling of nausea as she gazed at it. So she got up and walked to the window. The room faced west, and the hot afternoon sun smote full on her poor swollen eyes. Across the street the red brick walls of the engine-house caught the glare and sent it back. The firemen, in their blue shirt-sleeves, were seated in the shade before the door, their chairs tipped at an angle of sixty. The leading lady stared down into the sun-baked street, turned abruptly and made as though to fall upon the bed again, with a view to forming another little damp oasis on the pillow. But when she reached the center of the stifling little bedroom her eye chanced on the electric call-button near the door. Above the electric bell was tacked a printed placard giving information on the subjects of laundry, ice-water, bell-boys and dining-room hours.

The leading lady stood staring at it a moment thoughtfully. Then with a sudden swift movement she applied her forefinger to the button and held it there for a long half-minute. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed, her kimono folded about her, and waited.

She waited until a lank bell-boy, in a brown uniform that was some sizes too small for him, had ceased to take any interest in the game of chess which Bauer and Merkle, the champion firemen chess-players, were contesting on the walk before the open doorway of the engine-house. The proprietor of the Burke House had originally intended that the brown uniform be worn by a diminutive bell-boy, such as one sees in musical comedies. But the available supply of stage size bell-boys in our town is somewhat limited and was soon exhausted. There followed a succession of lank bell-boys, with arms and legs sticking ungracefully out of sleeves and trousers.

"Come!" called the leading lady quickly, in answer to the lank youth\'s footsteps, and before he had had time to knock.

"Ring?" asked the boy, stepping into the torrid little room.

The leading lady did not reply immediately. She swallowed something in her throat and pushed back the hair from her moist forehead again. The brown uniform repeated his question, a trifle irritably. Whereupon the leading lady spoke, desperately:

"Is there a woman around this place? I don\'t mean dining-room girls, or the person behind the cigar-counter."

Since falling heir to the brown uniform the lank youth had heard some strange requests. He had been interviewed by various ladies in varicolored kimonos relative to liquid refreshment, laundry and the cost of hiring a horse and rig for a couple of hours. One had even summoned him to ask if there was a Bible in the house. But this latest question was a new one. He stared, leaning against the door and thrusting one hand into the depths of his very tight breeches pocket.

"Why, there\'s Pearlie Schultz," he said at last, with a grin.

"Who\'s she?" The leading lady sat up expectantly.

"Steno."

The expectant figure drooped. "Blonde? And Irish crochet collar with a black velvet bow on her chest?"

"Who? Pearlie? Naw. You mustn\'t get Pearlie mixed with the common or garden variety of stenos. Pearlie is fat, and she wears specs and she\'s got a double chin. Her hair is skimpy and she don\'t wear no rat. W\'y no traveling man has ever tried to flirt with Pearlie yet. Pearlie\'s what you\'d call a woman, all right. You wouldn\'t never make a mistake and think she\'d escaped from the first row in the chorus."

The leading lady rose from the bed, reached out for her pocket-book, extracted a dime, and held it out to the bell-boy.

"Here. Will you ask her to come up here to me? Tell her I said please."

After he had gone she seated herself on the edge of the bed again, with a look in her eyes like that which you have seen in the eyes of a dog that is waiting for a door to be opened.

Fifteen minutes passed. The look in the eyes of the leading lady began to fade. Then a footstep sounded down the hall. The leading lady cocked her head to catch it, and smiled blissfully. It was a heavy, comfortable footstep, under which a board or two creaked. There came a big, sensible thump-thump-thump at the door, with stout knuckles. The leading lady flew to answer it. She flung the door wide and stood there, clutching her kimono at the throat and looking up into a red, good-natured face.

Pearlie Schultz looked down at the leading lady kindly and benignantly, as a mastiff might look at a terrier.

"Lonesome for a bosom to cry on?" asked she, and stepped into the room, walked to the west windows, and jerked down the shades with a zip-zip, shutting off the yellow glare. She came back to where the leading lady was standing and patted her on the cheek, lightly.

"You tell me all about it," said she, smiling.

The leading lady opened her lips, gulped, tried again, gulped again—Pearlie Schultz shook a sympathetic head.

"Ain\'t had a decent, close-to-nature powwow with a woman for weeks and weeks, have you?"

"How did you know?" cried the leading lady.

"You\'ve got that hungry look. There was a lady drummer here last winter, and she had the same expression. She was so dead sick of eating her supper and then going up to her ugly room and reading and sewing all evening that it was a wonder she\'d stayed good. She said it was easy enough for the men. They could smoke, and play pool, and go to a show, and talk to any one that looked good to \'em. But if she tried to amuse herself everybody\'d say she was tough. She cottoned to me like a burr to a wool skirt. She traveled for a perfumery house, and she said she hadn\'t talked to a woman, except the dry-goods clerks who were nice to her trying to work her for her perfume samples, for weeks an\' weeks. Why, that woman made crochet by the bolt, and mended her clothes evenings whether they needed it or not, and read till her eyes come near going back on her."

The leading lady seized Pearlie\'s hand and squeezed it.

"That\'s it! Why, I haven\'t talked—really talked—to a real woman since the company went out on the road. I\'m leading lady of the \'Second Wife\' company, you know. It\'s one of those small cast plays, with only five people in it. I play the wife, and I\'m the only woman in the cast. It\'s terrible. I ought to be thankful to get the part these days. And I was, too. But I didn\'t know it would be like this. I\'m going crazy. The men in the company are good kids, but I can\'t go trailing around after them all day. Besides, it wouldn\'t be right. They\'re all married, except Billy, who plays the kid, and he\'s busy writing a vawdeville skit that he thinks the New York managers are going to fight for when he gets back home. We were to play Athens, Wisconsin, to-night, but the house burned down night before last, and that left us with an open date. When I heard the news you\'d have thought I had lost my mother. It\'s bad enough having a whole day to kill but when I think of to-night," the leading lady\'s voice took on a note of hysteria, "it seems as though I\'d——"

"Say," Pearlie interrupted, abruptly, "you ain\'t got a real good corset-cover pattern, have you? One that fits smooth over the bust and don\'t slip off the shoulders? I don\'t seem able to get my hands on the kind I want."

"Have I!" yelled the leading lady. And made a flying leap from the bed to the floor.

She flapped back the cover of a big suit-case and began burrowing into its depths, strewing the floor with lingerie, newspaper clippings, blouses, photographs and Dutch collars. Pearlie came over and sat down on the floor in the midst of the litter. The leadin............