At the end of the week she would look at her check — and take small comfort. “You’ve got everything you really want right here,” Ken had said, “if you only knew it.”

If only she had known it.

Well, she knew it now. Now, frightened, bewildered, resentful. Thirty-seven. Why, thirty-seven was old in Hollywood. Not middle-aged, or getting on, or well preserved, but old. Even Lydia Lissome, at twenty, always made them put one thickness of chiffon over the camera’s lens before she would let them take the close-ups. Harrietta thought of that camera now as a cruel Cyclops from whose hungry eye nothing escaped — wrinkles, crow’s-feet — nothing.

They had been working two months on the picture. It was almost finished. Midsummer. Harrietta’s