the fat, girdleless "Momma" and her living stairway, now increased to nine little steps, from collapse.
As for other spending on the part of either, there was little save for board and keep—and not so much of that, it being one of the chiefest of the arts of both ring and cabaret entertainers to escape such expense.
This evening, before changing her costume, Carlotta reached for a newspaper which lay on her dresser, not her favourite daily but the Salthaven Log. She was probably the most remote, certainly the most incongruous, of its subscribers. Among the gilt bottles and makeup boxes the pale old English caption of the sheet stood out like some bulletin from Eden in a boudoir of Babylon, as anachronistic as Carlotta s vivid person would have been on the Salthaven sands.
That the little world whose revolutions it recorded was real, Carlotta knew because it sheltered a being on whom she had actually laid hands. Its existence was of course a rule-proving exception, since the tangible universe was bounded by three rivers, the North, the East, and the Harlem, and one bay; with Newark, Paterson, and Stamford somewhere vaguely out there as the outposts of civilization, sort of baby-farms for newly-born plays. Rural hamlet, Western plain, and lofty Alp, all were figments of the imagination, "sets" for revues, made out of whole cloth for box-office purposes and the livelihood of stage folk like herself. The very stars she had glimpsed once or twice in her life, could one capture them, would be sure to turn out five-pointed things of tinsel, stuck up there by Jake Shubert, Flo Ziegfeld, or some of the gods that be. If Jake said
