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Josie Fifer, dragging herself from bed to chair, and from chair to bed, used to watch for her. Hahn’s room was on her floor. Sarah Haddon, in her youth and beauty and triumph, represented to Josie all that she had dreamed of and never realised; all that she had hoped for and never could know. She used to insist on having her door open, and she would lie there for hours, her eyes fixed on that spot in the hall across which Haddon would flash for one brief instant on her way to the room down the corridor. There is about a successful actress a certain radiant something–a glamour, a luxuriousness, an atmosphere that suggest a mysterious mixture of silken things, of perfume, of adulation, of all that is rare and costly and perishable and desirable.

Josie Fifer’s stage experience had included none of this. But she knew they were there. She sensed that to this glorious artist would come all those fairy gifts that Josie Fifer would never possess. All things about her–her furs, her gloves, her walk, her hats, her voice, her very shoe ties–were just what Josie would have wished for. As she lay there she developed a certain grim philosophy.

“She’s got everything a woman could wish for. Me, I haven’t got a thing. Not a blamed thing! And yet they say everything works out in the end according to some scheme or other. Well, what’s the answer to this, I wonder? I can’t make it come out right. I guess one of the figures must have got away from me.”

In the second week of Sid Hahn’s convalescence he heard, somehow, of Josie Fifer. It was characteristic of him that he sent for her. She put a chiffon scarf about the neck of her skimpy little kimono, spent an hour and ten minutes on her hair, made up outrageously with that sublime unconsciousness that comes from too close familiarity with rouge pad and grease jar, and went. She was trembling as though facing a first-night audience in a part she wasn’t up on. Between the crutches, the lameness, and the trembling she presented to Sid Hahn, as she stood in the doorway, a picture that stabbed his kindly, sensitive heart with a quick pang of sympathy.

He held out his hand. Josie’s crept into it. At the feel of that generous friendly clasp she stopped trembling. Said Hahn:

“My nurse tells me that you can do a bedside burlesque of ‘East Lynne’ that made even that Boston-looking interne with the thick glasses laugh. Go on and do it for me, there’s a good girl. I could use a laugh myself just now.”

And Josie Fifer caught up a couch cover for a cloak, with the scarf that was about her neck for a veil, and, using Hahn himself as the ailing chee-ild, gave a biting burlesque of the famous bedside visit that brought the tears of laughter to his eyes, and the nurse flying from down the hall. “This won’t do,” said that austere person.

“Won’t, eh? Go on and stick your old thermometer in my mouth. What do I care! A laugh like that is worth five degrees of temperature.”

When Josie rose to leave he eyed her keenly, and pointed to the dragging leg.

“How about that? Temporary or permanent?”

“Permanent.”

“Oh, fudge! Who’s telling you that? These days they can do–“

“Not with this, though. That one bone was mashed into about twenty-nine splinters, and when it came to putting ’em together again a couple of pieces were missing. I must’ve mislaid ’em somewhere. Anyway, I make a limping exit–for life.”

“Then no more stage for you–eh, my girl?”

“No more stage.”

Hahn reached for a pad of paper on the table at his bedside, scrawled a few words on it, signed it “S.H.” in the fashion which became famous, and held the paper out to her.

“When you get out of here,” he said, “you come to New York, and up to my office; see? Give ’em this at the door. I’ve got a job for you–if you want it.”