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reached the quick of his nature. His mouth had just started to throb when there was a light tap, and the door to the casino opened.

Chapter Four
    T HE GIRL WHO NOW entered the room in a stagey green dress was a by-product of Hollywood that gets little attention in print, but that occurs with unhappy frequency in that enormous catch-basin of talent: the feeble residuary legatee of such life as remains in a family after some prodigious child has been born. Rarely on public view, they are to be seen in homes, clubs, and dressing rooms, these pale, futile, carbon-copies of greatness, having no identity of their own, no existence except what they can suck from somebody else. Most of them, however, are happier than the rest of us manage to be, for it is the irony of life that those whom they worship commonly love them to distraction, would do anything for them, try to do everything for them. The real story of many a celebrated actor, if anybody were cruel enough to print it, would turn out to be, not the romance that his fans talk about, or the success he has made in his profession, but his unremitting effort to bring Christmas into the life of some dimwit brother who means more to him than anything else on earth.
    How much this girl actually looked like Sylvia it would be impossible to say. Her figure, while not quite the sculptor’s dream that Sylvia’s was, was quite striking nevertheless, and similarly formed. Her hair, whatever its original color, had been bleached to the same shade of blondness as Sylvia’s, though it lacked Sylvia’s little glint of gold. Her eyes, a medium blue, weren’t so far from the gray of Sylvia’s. Her features, certainly, bore rather a marked resemblance. Yet, one suspected that actual similarity went no further than it commonly goes between two sisters. What made her look like Sylvia in so startling, in so shocking a way, was the slavish imitation of Sylvia that she indulged in, with every slightest grimace. From her walk, to her facial mannerisms, to the little wistful smile, to the sad look into distant spaces, she was Sylvia, at least in her own imagination, and could never, for one waking moment, be anybody else.
    She gave a little exclamation of delight at seeing her sister. “Has Vicki told you, Sylvia?”
    “ ... Yes, Hazel, he has.”
    “Are you going to forgive me?”
    “You haven’t done anything to me, darling.”
    “I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.”
    “Vicki has something to tell you.”
    “No plizze, Sylvia, you tell.”
    Sylvia’s arm went around her, and into her eyes came a queer look, like the look that comes into the eyes of a cat that smells chloroform. In a frightened, throaty whisper she asked what they meant, but it was a long time before Sylvia could answer. Then, miserably, she said: “Vicki’s not going to marry you, darling.”
    “ ... Why?”
    “I asked him not to.”
    “But why? ”
    “I didn’t think it would be good for you.”
    “You mean my trouble?”
    “It wouldn’t work out.”
    “But my trouble is all we ever talk about. He’s going to take me to Vienna when the war’s over, and there are doctors there that know all about it, and it’s going to be a simple matter for me to get cured.”
    “It might not turn out that way.”
    “But, Vicki—”
    “Isn’t really much of a psychiatrist.”
    Vicki, his mouth throbbing now in a veritable flutter, came over now, murmuring Hazel’s name in a frenzy of compassion. He patted her on the head, said: “I never know thees t’ing till Sylvia, today she tell. Todayheute I on’stan all. Is moch better, Hezzel, we do like Sylvia say. All lahve Sylvia, no? All t’ink Sylvia know best?”
    For answer Hazel opened her handbag, took out a cigarette. Then she began walking around. In spite of Sylvia’s reminders that the doctors had told her not to smoke, she kept snapping the cigarette against her thumbnail, in nervous, ominous taps. Then she moistened her lips, in the way Sylvia