Chapter XXVIII

The first thing Gloria did the next morning was to telephone Henry Moss, the gardener, who had sold Dick the dwarf evergreens that circled the house.

She told him just how she wanted the garden in the backyard laid out.

"And send your bill to me, not to Mr. Gregory," she added. "I'm fixing up the yard as a birthday present for him."

"I certainly am getting to be an artist at telling white lies!" she remarked to herself on her way downtown to Dick's office. "All I hope is that I can keep track of the fibs I've told different people."

Miss Briggs had the money ready for her. Gloria counted it ... ten $20 bills in a white envelope.

Gloria wished she could keep the money for herself. There was a red dress in one of the stores that she would love to have, a cunning thing with a bell-shaped bodice.

Stan was waiting for her on their street corner.

"Lord, but I hate to take this!" he said, as he slipped the envelope of bills into his pocket. "But it's only a loan. I'll return it to you inside of three or four weeks."

"Yes, I'm afraid you'll have to unless you want me to lose my happy home," Gloria answered frankly. "I got the money from Dick's secretary. And I told her I wanted it for some gardening that I'm having done. So you see, I'll really have to have the money, so I can pay the bill when it comes in on the first of the month."

"Don't worry, Russet, you'll get it," Wayburn answered. There was more than a shade of sarcasm in his voice.

He took a cheap nickeled watch from his pocket and looked at it.

"I made an appointment with the tailor this morning," he said. "And I'm ten minutes late, now.... Too bad we couldn't have spent the afternoon together. Meet me tomorrow, will you? We'll go for a hike, eh, what?"

Gloria didn't answer him at once.

She had made up her mind not to see him again.

And besides she was angry with him for making an appointment with the tailor. He might, at least, have tried to persuade her to spend the afternoon with him, she thought!

"N-no," she began.

Wayburn laid one of his hands on her arm.

"Oh, have a heart, Russet," he pleaded. "I'm going away in a week or two. It can't hurt anybody if we see each other once in a while, can it?"

"All right," Gloria yielded. "I'll bring the car here to-morrow at this time. Would you like to drive out into the country?"

"Sure. We'll watch the grass grow, and listen to the zimwitch bird singing in the amfalula trees," Wayburn answered, nonsensically. He showed his strong white teeth in a broad grin, and went.

Gloria watched him go. He carried himself with an air of engaging insolence.

"He's the best-looking man anywhere!" Gloria remarked to herself. "But I wonder if I'll ever see that $200 again!"

She didn't know what she would do if Stan failed to pay it back before Henry Moss' bill came in ...

She walked along the Avenue, window-shopping as she went. The little red dress with the bell-shaped waist was still in the show-window where she had seen it a few days before.

"I think I'll go in and try it on," Gloria thought. "Of course I can't afford it. But I'd like to see how I look in it, anyway."

She went into the store.

"There's a little dress down in the window that I'd like to try on," she told the saleswoman who came to wait on her. "A little red crêpe."

The saleswoman looked at her doubtfully.

"That dress in the window is a small size," she said. "I don't believe it's big enough for you."

"Nonsense," Gloria said sharply. "I weigh only 115 pounds. I always wear misses' sizes."

She took off her own dress in the fitting-room while the saleswoman went to get the dress out of the window.

Perhaps she would buy the dress, after all, if it was becoming....

So long as she was going to see Stan again, she might just as well look pretty for him, she decided.

Gloria drew in her breath as the saleswoman slipped the red dress over her head, and began to fasten it down the back. It was just the least bit tight across the shoulders.

"I'm sorry, but the dress won't go around your waist," the saleswoman said, finally. She straightened up from her task of trying to pull the dress together. Her face was scarlet with the effort.

She slipped a tape measure around Gloria's waist and held it up so she could see the measurements. Gloria gasped.

"Let me try," said Gloria, impatiently. She pulled and tugged at the dress, but it simply would not go around her. At last she unbuttoned it and took it off roughly.

"Would you like to see anything else?" the saleswoman asked.

Gloria shook her head. She put on her own dress, and, carrying her hat and coat over her arm, hurried to the rest-room on the next floor.

She dropped a penny in the weighing machine that stood there, and breathlessly watched the hand swing slowly upwards.

One hundred and twenty-four pounds! ... Oh, she couldn't weigh that much! The scales must be wrong.

On her way home, Gloria stopped at a drug store and weighed herself again. This time the scales told her that she weighed 125 pounds!

"Well, what do you know about that!" she thought unhappily. "This is what comes from breakfasting in bed, I suppose! But I'll bet I'll lose ten pounds this next week or know the reason why!"

That night Gloria ate no dinner.

When Dick had finished his, and Ranghild had carried the tray downstairs, Gloria went into his room.

"Look at me, Rikky," she said. "Am I getting too fat?"

Dick looked at her critically as she turned slowly around before him.

"You look just the same to me as you always have," he said at last. "I don't see any change in you. You're still the prettiest thing that ever lived!"

"Now, that just proves that you never really look at me! I've gained 10 pounds!" Gloria cried tragically.

Dick laughed at her woebegone face.

"Well, what of it? That's not much. And besides a little plumpness is becoming to a woman," Dick answered. "And if you were as fat as the prize-winner in a Turkish beauty show, you'd still be the loveliest woman in the world to me."

Gloria curled her lip.

"Unfortunately there's other people besides you to look at me," she said. "People who really see me."

"I suppose I see you with my heart rather than with my eyes, Gloria," Dick said quietly.

"That's a good line. Where did you get it? From a Valentine?" Gloria asked impudently.

The next morning she ate no breakfast.

By 9 o'clock she was on her way downtown.

And by 9.30 she was sitting in a steam-cabinet in a beauty shop, trying to perspire away a pound or two before lunch.

Lunch, she decided, would be a cup of coffee without cream or sugar.

It would stimulate her, she figured, without adding an ounce of weight to her body. And Gloria needed something stimulating.

Her head swam, and there was a ringing in her ears, as she sat in the reducing cabinet.

It was terrible. Gloria felt as if she were being burned slowly at the stake.

Marie, the operator, kept putting towels wrung out of ice water on her forehead. But they didn't help much.

Gloria kept telling herself that she didn't care how much she suffered so long as it helped her to get thin.

But at last she could stand the heat no longer.

"Let me out, Marie!" she cried. "Let me out! I've changed my mind! I don't want to be thin if I have to go through this torture! Let me out this minute!"

Marie gave her an enormous Turkish towel to wrap herself in, and told her to lie down on the wicker couch to rest.

"You're just like all my ladies," Marie said. "They all say they'll never get in the cabinet again. But next day they're back for another sweating! ... Get on the scales, Mrs. Gregory, and we'll see how much you've lost."

Gloria had lost almost a pound in weight. She clapped her hands.

"Well, isn't that wonderful! In just that short time!" she cried delighted. "I should say I will come back to-morrow, Marie! I should worry how much it hurts! It's worth it!"

"Now there's just one hitch in this reducing stunt," Marie told her. "Sometimes when a woman loses flesh too quickly, her face sags. Don't you think I'd better give you a facial treatment to tone up the muscles? I notice you're getting a double chin."

A double chin! Horrors!

Gloria snatched up a hand mirror and peered into it.

Yes.... Marie was right. There was no doubt that there was a creased fullness under her chin.

"Isn't that terrible?" she appealed to Marie. "Can you really massage it away?"

"Massage? Massage has gone out of style," Marie told her. "We pat double chins and wrinkles away now with these little paddles."

She picked up two tiny ivory implements shaped like tennis racquets and showed them to Gloria.

"Japanese women have used them for centuries, and they have the smoothest skins of any women on earth," she went on.

Gloria lay back in the long leather chair before the mirror and closed her eyes.

She winced as Marie wrapped her face in steaming towels, lathered it with a sweet-smelling cream and began to smack it smartly with the little ivory paddles.

"I hope you're not ruining my looks. I have a heavy date at two o'clock," she said. She would hate to have Stanley Wayburn see her with her face red as a lobster from Marie's strenuous treatment!

"I'm not," Marie answered placidly. "You'll look like a million dollars when I finish with you. I'm against most beauty treatments, but this is really good for the skin."

"I used to say," she went on, "that there was nothing like good, cold water for the complexion. And that was all right back in the old days when there wasn't so much smoke and dirt in the world. But these days you've got to get right down into the pores with a good cream to get the grime out of them!"

Gloria didn't answer. She had gone to sleep—utterly exhausted.

She did not waken while Marie powdered and rouged her face, and brushed mascara along her brows and lashes.

"Please take all that stuff off my eyelashes," she said, when Marie had finally wakened her by shaking her briskly. "It makes me look like a clown."

"It does not. It makes you look like a great big wax doll," Marie said. "To my way of thinking you're a lot better looking with your eyes touched up a bit.... Don't make the mistake of thinking you're one of the women who don't need make-up, Mrs. Gregory! Only one woman in a thousand is so pretty that she doesn't need it!"

Gloria stared at her crestfallen.

Then she looked into the mirror.

She had always thought that she was the one woman in a thousand who was so beautiful that she didn't need more than the lightest touch of rouge and powder to make her as ravishing as Helen of Troy!

Could it be that she was losing her looks?

She studied her face in the brilliantly-lighted mirror.

No, she wasn't as pretty as she had been. There was a hard look in her eyes, and fat was certainly not becoming to her!

What had happened to her during these few months of marriage to make her look this way?

Gloria wondered if all the cocktails and the wild parties had had anything to do with it? Or her worry over Stanley Wayburn? ... Well, he'd be gone soon, at any rate.

Gloria, at that moment, wished that he had gone already.

And yet, her heart soared like an early-rising lark as she went out into the street to meet him.