Wanted: A Husband (Illustrated)

OUT OF ORDER! pertly announced the placard on the elevator. To Miss Darcy Cole, wavering on damp, ill-conditioned, and reluctant legs, this seemed the final malignancy of the mean-spirited fates. Four beetling flights to climb! Was it worth the effort? Was anything worth the effort of that heart-breaking ascent? For that matter, was anything worth anything, anyway? Into such depths of despond had the spirit of Miss Cole lapsed.
020
At the top of the frowning heights the studio apartment of Miss Gloria Greene would open to her. There would be tea, fresh-brewed and invigorating. There would be a broad and restful couch full of fluffy pillows, comforting to tired limbs. There would be Gloria Greene herself, big and beautiful and radiant, representing everything which poor little Darcy Cole was not but most wished to be, and, furthermore, a sure source of wise counsel, or, at worst, of kindly solace for a case which might be too hopeless for counsel. As alternative, a return to the wind-swept, rain-chilled New York side street. No; the thing had to be done! Darcy nerved her soggy muscles to the ordeal.
On the second landing she paused to divide a few moments between hard breathing and hating the imitation-leather roll beneath her arm. Including the wall-paper design within, just rejected by B. Riegel & Sons, the whole affair might have weighed two pounds. To its ill-conditioned bearer it felt like two hundred. She set a hand to her panting chest and a thorn promptly impaled her thumb. Tearing off the offending rose Darcy flung it over the banister rail. It was a flabby, second-hand wraith of a rose, anyhow, having been passed down to the wearer by her flat-mate, Maud Raines, who in turn had it, along with eleven others, from her fiancé.
Darcy stuck out a vindictive tongue at the discarded flower. Nobody ever sent her roses! Dully musing upon the injustices of existence, she clambered up the third flight and leaned against the wall to rally her spent energies, with her hands thrust deep into the sagging pockets of her coat. Something light and scratchy rubbed against her bare forefinger, which was protruding from a hole in her glove. Being exhumed, it revealed itself as one of those tiny paper frills wherein high-priced candy is chastely attired. The departed bonbon had come from a box sent by Paul Wood, the architect, to Darcy's other flat-mate, Helen Barrett, to whom he had just become engaged. Darcy let the inoffensive ornament flutter from her fingers to the floor and crushed it flat with a vengeful foot. Nobody ever sent her candy in frilly collars! Nobody ever sent her anything! Oozing wretchedness and self-pity, she took the final flight in a rush, burst in upon the labors of Miss Gloria Greene, planted herself in the middle of the floor, dropped her work roll and kicked it as far as she could, and lifted up the voice of lamentation in the accepted phrase, duly made and provided for such of feminine sex and tender years as find the weary pattern of the world too tangled for their solving.
"Oh, I wuh—wuh—wish I were duh—duh—dead!" mourned Miss Cole with violence.
Gloria Greene dropped the typed sheets which she had been studying and rose from her chair. She looked down at the lumpy, lax figure of helpless, petulant rebellion before her.
"Oh, you do, do you?" she remarked pensively.
"Yes; I do!"
"So do most people at one time or another," was Miss Greene's philosophical commentary upon this.
"Not you," declared Darcy, glancing up at the vivid face above her resentfully. "I'll bet you've never known what it is to feel that way in your life."
"Oh, I'm too busy for such nonsense," returned Gloria in her serene and caressing voice.
Indeed, it would be difficult for any one favored with Miss Gloria Greene's acquaintance to imagine her wishing to depart a life to the enjoyment of which she has vastly added for thousands of people. For under a slightly different name Miss Greene is known to and admired by most of the theater-going populace of the United States. From the top of her ruddy, imperiously poised head to the tip of her perfectly shod toes, she justifies and fulfills in every line and motion the happy thought which inspired the dean of American playwrights to nickname her "Gloria." Deeper than her beauty and abounding vitality there lies a more profound quality, the rare gift of giving graciously and naturally. It is Gloria Greene's unconscious and intuitive mission in life to lend color and light and cheer to colorless, dim, and forlorn folk wherever she encounters them. That is why Darcy Cole was, at the moment, dribbling tears and aspirations for an immediate demise all over Gloria's rare Anatolian rug. Not that Darcy really desired to die. She merely wished Gloria Greene to make life more practicable for her.
"That's imagination, you know," continued the actress.
"It isn't," snivelled Darcy.