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Though it was scarcely thirty minutes into twilight, darkness was beginning to settle thickly over the city of New York, and night’s sudden approach was nowhere more apparent than by the fountain in Central Park. But the sudden encroachment of darkness was halted this particular evening, and the well-manicured lawns of the Park, still bearing the traces of summer green well into September, were brightly lighted with a half dozen carbon arcs, their bluish smoke-streams faintly trailing out behind them as they cast a daylight-bright glow onto the trio of fashion models being led through their practiced motions by one of the city’s leading ad agency creative directors, Marty Felder. And mingled in with the crowd of curious passers-by and agency hangers on were two young people who viewed the fascinating scenario of television color commercials being created with particular interest, Jessica Richards and her boyfriend, Phillip Wright, had not chanced on this happening-in-the-Park; their presence had been carefully calculated, right down to the cost of the subway that brought them here from Jessica’s aunt’s brownstone house down near the Village. Actually, the scheming was more of Jessica’s doing than of Phillip’s, for she alone had a real and clearly defined reason for being present when Marty Felder put his models through their paces. Jessica, too, was a model; at least, she’d studied successfully with one of the east’s top modeling schools and had been through the necessary requisites of fifteen dollar modeling assignments and posing for the mandatory badge of the modeling profession, the portfolio of stills every girl lugged from agency to agency until she found just that right break that tossed her into the hundred dollar an hour league and splashed her features across the country’s biggest magazines. But Jessica Richards had not yet discovered that break, though she’d tried as diligently and determinedly as any girl in New York, and Marty Felder offered her the one shortcut available. But it was a painful shortcut she dreaded to take, one that would destroy everything between her and Phillips if he were to find out.
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.