An ingratiating, expert
cream, known the black-faced world over. It slid into the skin, not
sootily, but illuminating it to winking, African copper. For instance,
Hattie's make-up cream for Linda in "Love Me Long" was labeled
"Chocolate." But it worked in even a truer brown, as if it had come out
of the pigment instead of gone into the pores.
Four hours of stirring it took, adding with exact minutiae the
mysteriously proper proportions of spermacetti, oil of sweet almonds,
white wax--But never mind. Hattie's dark secret was her own.
Fourteen years of her black art as Broadway's maid _de luxe_ had been
her laboratory. It was almost her boast now--remember the sunken
headstones--that she had handled spotlessly every fair young star of the
theaters' last ten years.
It was as mysterious as pigment, her cream, and as true, and netted
her, with occasional extra batches, an average of two hundred dollars a
month. She enjoyed making it. Singing as she stirred or rather stirring
as she sang, the plenitude of her figure enveloped in a blue-and-white
bungalow apron with rickrack trimming.
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