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up enough to say, "Oo."
    "Dear," said Doris, "I'm going to ask you a personal question."
    "All right," said Helene.
    "Have you ever been in love?" said Doris. "The reason I ask," she said, "remembering some old love might help you put more warmth in your acting."
    Helene frowned and thought hard. "Well," she said, "I travel a lot, you know. And practically all the men in the different companies I visit are married and I never stay anyplace long enough to know many people who aren't."
    "What about school?" said Doris. "What about puppy love and all the other kinds of love in school?"
    So Helene thought hard about that, and then she said, "Even in school I was always moving around a lot. My father was a construction worker, following jobs around, so I was always saying hello or good-by to someplace, without anything in between."
    "Um," said Doris.
    "Would movie stars count?" said Helene. "I don't mean in real life. I never knew any. I just mean up on the screen."
    Doris looked at me and rolled her eyes. "I guess that's love of a kind," she said.
    And then Helene got a little enthusiastic. "I used to sit through movies over and over again," she said, "and pretend I was married to whoever the man movie star was. They were the only people who came with us. No matter where we moved, movie stars were there."
    "Uh huh," said Doris.
    "Well, thank you, Miss Shaw," I said. "You go downstairs and wait with the rest. We'll let you know."
    So we tried to find another Stella. And there just wasn't one, not one woman in the club with the dew still on her. "All we've got are Blanches," I said, meaning all we had were faded women who could play the part of Blanche, Stella's faded sister. "That's life, I guess—twenty Blanches to one Stella."
    "And when you find a Stella," said Doris, "it turns out she doesn't know what love is."
    Doris and I decided there was one last thing we could try. We could get Harry Nash to play a scene along with Helene. "He just might make her bubble the least little bit," I said.
    "That girl hasn't got a bubble in her," said Doris.
    So we called down the stairs for Helene to come back on up, and we told somebody to go find Harry. Harry never sat with the rest of the people at tryouts—or at rehearsals either. The minute he didn't have a part to play, he'd disappear into some hiding place where he could hear people call him, but where he couldn't be seen. At tryouts in the library he generally hid in the reference room, passing the time looking at flags of different countries in the front of the dictionary.
    Helene came back upstairs, and we were very sorry and surprised to see that she'd been crying.
    "Oh, dear," said Doris. "Oh, my—now what on earth's the trouble, dear?"
    "I was terrible, wasn't I?" said Helene, hanging her head.
    Doris said the only thing anybody can say in an amateur theatrical society when somebody cries. She said, "Why, no dear— you were marvelous."
    "No, I wasn't," said Helene. "I'm a walking icebox, and I know it."
    "Nobody could look at you and say that," said Doris.
    "When they get to know me, they can say it," said Helene. "When people get to know me, that's what they do say." Her tears got worse. "I don't want to be the way I am," she said. "I just can't help it, living the way I've lived all my life. The only experiences I've had have been in crazy dreams of movie stars. When I meet somebody nice in real life, I feel as though I were in some kind of big bottle, as though I couldn't touch that person, no matter how hard I tried." And Helene pushed on air as though it were a big bottle all around her.
    "You ask me if I've ever been in love," she said to Doris. "No— but I want to be. I know what this play's about. I know what Stella's supposed to feel and why she feels it. I—I—I—" she said, and her tears wouldn't let her go on.
    "You what, dear?" said Doris gently.
    "I—" said Helene, and she pushed on the imaginary bottle again. "I just don't know how to begin," she