1 files changed, 16383 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/9858.txt b/9858.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ebbedd3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9858.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,16383 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Star-Dust, by Fannie Hurst
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Star-Dust
+       A Story of an American Girl
+
+Author: Fannie Hurst
+
+Posting Date: December 10, 2011 [EBook #9858]
+Release Date: February, 2006
+First Posted: October 24, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STAR-DUST ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and PG
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "HER BLOOD WAS POUNDING AND HER VOICE WAS IN FLIGHT"]
+
+
+                               STAR-DUST
+
+                       A Story of an American Girl
+
+                            BY FANNIE HURST
+
+                                  1921
+
+
+
+Book One
+
+THE VINE
+
+     Oh, the little more and how much it is:
+     And the little less, and what worlds away.
+                                             --BROWNING.
+
+[Greek: Zoae]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+When Lilly Becker eked out with one hand that most indomitable of
+pianoforte selections, Rubinstein's "Melody in F," her young mind had a
+habit of transcending itself into some such illusory realm as this:
+Springtime seen lacily through a phantasmagoria of song. A very floral
+sward. Fountains that tossed up coloratura bubbles of sheerest aria and
+a sort of Greek frieze of youth attitudinized toward herself.
+
+This frieze was almost invariably composed of Estelle Foote, a
+successful rival in a class candidacy for the sponge-and-basin
+monitorship; Sydney Prothero, infallible of spitball aim; Miss Lare with
+her spectacles very low on her nose and a powdering of chalk dust down
+her black alpaca; Flora Kemble with infinitely fewer friendship bangles
+on her silver link bracelet; Roy Kemble, kissing her yellow, rather than
+yanking her brown, braids.
+
+And then suddenly, apropos of nothing except the sweet ache of Lilly's
+little soul, the second movement would freeze itself into a proscenium
+arch of music, herself, like a stalagmite, its slim center.
+
+At this point, "Melody in F" veils itself in a mist of arpeggios, and
+Mrs. Becker, who invariably, during the after-school practice hour, sat
+upstairs with Mrs. Kemble in her sunny second-story back, would call
+down through the purposely opened floor register.
+
+"Lilly, not so fast on that part."
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+Were it not that the salient spots, the platform places in experience,
+are floored over in little more or less identical mosaics of all the
+commonplace day by days, Lilly Becker, at the rented-by-the-month piano
+in her parents' back parlor in Mrs. Schum's boarding house, her two
+chestnut braids rather precociously long and thick down her back, her
+mother rocking rhythmically overhead, were spurious to this narrative.
+
+Yet how much more potently than by the mere exposition of it and because
+you have looked in on the nine-year-old chemistry of a vocal and blond
+dream in the dreaming, are you to know the Lilly of seventeen, who
+secretly and unsuccessfully washed her hair in a solution of peroxide,
+and at eighteen, through the patent device of a megaphone inserted
+through a plate-glass window, was singing to--But anon.
+
+There was a game Lilly used to play on the front stairs of Mrs.
+Schum's boarding house, winter evenings after dinner. She and
+Lester Eli, who, at seventeen, was to drown in a pleasure canoe; Snow
+Horton--clandestinely present--daughter of a neighborhood dentist and
+forbidden to play with the "boarding-house children"; Flora and Roy
+Kemble, twins; and little Harry Calvert, who would creep up like a dirty
+little white mouse from the basement kitchen.
+
+"C"--hissed sibilantly.
+
+"Can't carry cranky cats!"
+
+"No fair, Snow; that doesn't make sense."
+
+"Does."
+
+"Your turn, Roy."
+
+"Z."
+
+"No fair. Nothing begins with 'Z.'"
+
+LILLY: "Does so. Z! Z--zounds--zippy--zingorella--zoe! Zoe!"
+
+By similar strain of alliterative classification, Mrs. Schum's boarding
+house might have been indexed as Middle West, middle class, medium
+price, and meager of meal.
+
+Poor, callous-footed Mrs. Schum, with her spotted bombazine bosom and
+her loosely anchored knob of gray hair! She was the color of cold dish
+water at that horrid moment when the grease begins to float, her hands
+were corroded with it, and her smile somehow could catch you by the
+heartstrings, which smiles have no right to do. How patiently and how
+drearily she padded through these early years of Lilly's existence.
+There were rubber insets in her shoes which sagged so that her ankles
+seemed actually to touch the floor from the climbing upstairs and
+downstairs on her missionary treadmill of the cracked slop jar; the fly
+in the milk; the too-tepid shaving water; the bathroom monopoly; the
+infant cacophony of midnight colic; salt on the sleety sidewalk, the
+pasted handkerchief against a front window pane; ice water. Towels.
+Towels. Towels.
+
+And how saucily after school would Lilly plant herself down in the
+subterranean depths of the kitchen.
+
+"Mrs. Schum, mamma says to give me a piece of bread and butter."
+
+With her worried eyes Mrs. Schum would smile and invariably hand out a
+thick slice, thinly buttered.
+
+"More butter, mamma said."
+
+"That's plenty, dearie; too much isn't good for little girls'
+complexions."
+
+"More but-ter!"
+
+"Here, then."
+
+Scalloping the air with it before little Harry's meek eyes: "You can't
+have any. You don't pay board. We do!"
+
+"My Mamma-Annie she paid board once. Uh-huh! my Mamma-Annie she's an
+angel in heaven and you aren't. Uh-huh!" This from little Harry, who was
+far too pale and wore furiously stained blouses.
+
+"But your mamma-Annie's dead now. You can't be a real live angel without
+being dead first, and I'd rather be me."
+
+"Lilly, aren't you ashamed? You run on now, or I'll tell your mamma.
+Poor little Harry can't help it he's an orphan with only his old gramaw
+to look after him. You a great big girl with your mother and father to
+do for you. It's not nice to be against Harry."
+
+"Well, what was I saying so much, Mrs. Schum? Can I help it he says
+she's an angel? Here, Harry, you can have it. Mamma's got a whole basket
+of apples in the closet and a dozen oranges. Honest, take it, I'm
+not hungry."
+
+He would mouth into it, round eyes gazing at her above the rim of crust.
+
+There were times again when Lilly would bare her teeth and crunch them
+in a paroxysm of rage and tyranny over little Harry. She would delight
+in making herself terrible to him, pinch and tower over the huddle of
+him with her hands hooked inward like talons. His meekness hurt her to
+frenzy, and because she was ashamed of tears she clawed.
+
+"Oh, you! You! You just make me feel like--I don't know what."
+
+"Ouch! Lilly, you pinch!"
+
+"Well, then, don't always hold your head off to one side like somebody
+was going to hit you. I hate it. It makes me feel like wanting to
+hit you."
+
+"I won't."
+
+"You aren't such a goody-goody. You steal. You stole some balls of twine
+my papa brought home from his factory. Mamma says you got it behind
+your ears."
+
+"I haven't anything behind my ears."
+
+"Oh, silly! Everything isn't there just because you say it's there. If I
+close my eyes just a little eeny, I can see birds and fountains and a
+beautiful stage, and me with my hair all gold, and a blue satin train
+that kicks back when I walk, and all the music in the world winding
+around me like--like everything--like smoke. But it isn't truly there,
+silly, except inside of me."
+
+"Haw."
+
+"I'm going to be the beautifulest singer in the world some day, with a
+voice that goes as high as anything, and be on the stage, and you can't
+even be on it with me."
+
+"'N' I'm going to work in a butcher shop and give gramaw all the meat
+she wants without even putting it down in the book."
+
+"You steal."
+
+"Don't."
+
+"Do."
+
+"And I won't ever have to touch the meat if it's got blood on."
+
+"Fraidy, scared of a little blood." Then with not a great deal of
+relevance, "I could have the yellowest hair in the world if I
+wanted to."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Oh, by just wanting to."
+
+"Nit."
+
+"Could."
+
+"Your mamma's calling you."
+
+"Lil-ly, come practice."
+
+"I'm coming." To Harry, "I can do something you can't do."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Hop up six stairs on one foot."
+
+"Dare you."
+
+Ankle cupped in her hand, brown braids bobbing, she would thus essay
+two, three, even four steps of staggering ascent, collapsing then
+against the banister.
+
+"Ouch!"
+
+"Told you so."
+
+"Well, I nearly did."
+
+"Oh, you _nearly_ do everything."
+
+"I can't help it if my foot isn't strong enough to hold me."
+
+"Lil-ly, don't let me have to call you again."
+
+"I'm coming, mamma." And then for a final tantalizing gleam of her
+little self across the banister, "Last tag."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+One wall of the Becker back parlor was darkly composed of walnut folding
+doors dividing it from the front-parlor bachelor apartment of Mr.
+Hazzard, city salesman for the J.D. Nichols Fancy Grocery Supply
+Company, his own horse and buggy furnished by the firm.
+
+It was Mrs. Becker's habit during his day-long absence, in fact just as
+soon as her acute ear detected the scraping departure of his tin-tired
+wheels from the curb, to fling back these folding doors for the rush of
+daylight and sense of space, often venturing in beside the front window
+with a bit of sewing and pottering ever so discreetly at the sample
+packages of fine teas, jars of perfectly conserved asparagus, peas, and
+olives spread out on his mantelpiece and fingering, again ever so
+discreetly, the neatly ripped stack of letters on the dresser. Once, and
+despite Mrs. Becker's frantic swoop to save it, a piece of pressed
+flower fell out from one of these envelopes in the handling, crumbling
+to bits as it fluttered to the floor.
+
+Next morning the folding doors refused to part to touch, an eye to the
+keyhole discovering it clogged with key. Then Lilly began music lessons
+and the newly rented upright piano was drawn up against these doors.
+
+Never were fingers more recalcitrant at musical chores. The Bach
+"Inventions" were weary digital gyrations against the slow-moving hands
+of the alarm clock perched directly in her line of vision. Czerny, too,
+was punctuated with quick little forays between notes, into a paper bag
+of "baby pretzels" at the treble end of the piano, often as not lopping
+over on the keyboard.
+
+But with the plunge into brilliant but faulty execution of one of her
+"pieces," her little face would flood over and tighten up into the
+glyptic immobility of a cameo and her toes curl as they pressed
+the pedals.
+
+"The Storm King" of the Parlor Pianoforte Series was a favorite. Dashing
+her quickly memorized way through it, she would follow closely the brief
+printed synopsis on the cover page ... _suddenly the clouds gather, a
+bird carols, a faint rumble is heard in the distance (it is important
+that the student practice this base tremolo with left hand only), the
+rush of approaching wind mingles with the nearing roll of thunder,
+accompanied by occasional flashes of lightning_....
+
+The red would run up into Lilly's face and her hands churn the white
+keys into a curdled froth of dissonance.
+
+"Lil-ly, not so fast. Play 'Selections from Faust' now, slowly, and
+count, the way Miss Lee said you should."
+
+Another favorite was the just published "Narcissus" of Nevin. Its
+cross-hand movement was a phillipic to her ever-ready-to-ferment fancy.
+Head back and gaze into the scroll-and-silk front of the piano, the
+melody would again, like a curve of gold, shape itself into the lovely
+form of a proscenium arch.
+
+"Lilly, that is beautiful. Play the tune part over again."
+
+The tingling that would actually gooseflesh her would die down as
+surely as a ringing crystal tumbler, had she closed her warm little
+hand over it.
+
+"Mamma," her voice directed upward toward the open register, "can I--may
+I go out on my tricycle?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I've only ten minutes yet, mamma. I'll make them up to-morrow."
+
+"No, I don't intend to pay Miss Lee fifty cents a lesson so you can go
+out and ride on your tricycle. You bothered me for the lessons, so now
+you practice. Work on 'Narcissus' so you can play it for your father
+to-night."
+
+"Oh, mom, please."
+
+"I don't care. Go! Only put on your hat and don't let me see you riding
+around on Taylor Avenue."
+
+"No'm."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The St. Louis of Lilly's little girlhood, sprung so thrivingly from the
+left bank of the Mississippi and builded on the dead mounds of a dead
+past, was even then inexplicably turning its back to its fine river
+frontage; stretching in the form of a great adolescent giant, prone,
+legs flung to the west and full of growing pains, arms outstretched and
+curving downward in a great north-and-south yawn.
+
+Taylor Avenue (then almost the city's edge, and which now is a girdle
+worn high about its gigantic middle) petered out into violently muddy
+and unmade streets and great patches of unimproved vacant lots that in
+winter were gaunt with husks.
+
+A pantechnicon procession of the more daring, shot with the growing
+pains, was grading and building into the vast clayey seas west of
+Kings-highway, but for the most part St. Louis contained herself
+gregariously enough within her limits, content in those years when the
+country rang hollowly to the cracked ring of free silver to huddle under
+the same blanket with her smoke-belching industries.
+
+A picture postcard of a brewery, piled high like a castle and with
+stables of Augean collosity, rose from the south tip of the city to the
+sour-malt supremacy of the world; boots, shoes, tobacco, and street cars
+bringing up by a nose, Eads Bridge, across the strong breast of the
+Mississippi, flinging roads of commerce westward ho.
+
+For one rapidly transitional moment street-car traffic in St. Louis
+stood in three simultaneous stages of its lepidopterous development: a
+caterpillar horse-car system crawled north and south along Jefferson
+Avenue, glass coin box and the backward glance of the driver, in lieu of
+conductor. A cable-car system ready to burst its chrysalis purred the
+length of Olive Street, and a first electric car, brightly painted, and
+with a proud antenna of trolley, had already whizzed out
+Washington Avenue.
+
+When Lilly was twelve years old her walk to school was across quite an
+intricacy of electric-car tracks, and on rainy days, out of a small fund
+of children's car tickets laid by in Mrs. Becker's glove box for just
+that contingency, she would ride to and from school, changing cars with
+a drilled precision at Vandaventer and Finney Avenues.
+
+For the first few of these adventures Mrs. Becker wrote tiny notes, to
+be handed out by Lilly along with her street-car ticket:
+
+Conductor, please let this little girl off at Jefferson Avenue: she
+wants to change cars for the Pope School.
+
+One day by some mischievous mischance Mrs. Schum's board receipt found
+its way into Lilly's little pocketbook:
+
+Received of Mrs. Ben Becker, forty-five dollars for one month's board
+for three.
+
+"Aw," said the conductor, thrusting it back at her, "ask your mamma to
+tell her troubles to a policeman, little girl."
+
+From that day Lilly rebelled.
+
+"Guess I can find my way to school without having to carry a note like a
+baby."
+
+"But, Lilly, you might get mixed up."
+
+"Nit."
+
+"Don't sass me that way or I'll tell your father when he comes home
+to-night."
+
+A never quite bursting cloud which hung over the entire of Lilly's
+girlhood was this ever-impending threat which even in its rare execution
+brought forth no more than a mild and rather sad rebuke from a mild and
+rather sad father, and yet which was certain to quell any rising
+rebellion.
+
+"I notice you never get sassy or ugly to your father, Lilly. I do all
+the stinting and make all the sacrifices and your father gets all
+the respect."
+
+"Mamma, how can you say that!"
+
+"Because it's a fact. To him it is always, 'Yes, sir, no, sir.' I'm
+going to tell him a few things when he comes home to-night of what I go
+through with all day in his absence. Elocution lessons! Just you ask him
+for them yourself."
+
+"Oh, mamma, you promised!"
+
+"Well, I will, but I oughtn't."
+
+Every evening until long after Lilly's dresses had descended to her shoe
+tops and until the ritual came to have a distinctly ridiculous aspect,
+there took place the one pleasantry in which Lilly and her father
+ever indulged.
+
+About fifteen minutes before seven, three staccato rings would come at
+the front-door bell. At her sewing or what not, Mrs. Becker would glance
+up with birdlike quickness.
+
+"That's papa!" And Lilly, almost invariably curled over a book, would
+jump up and take stand tensely against the wall so that when the room
+door opened it would swing back, concealing her.
+
+In the frame of that open doorway Mrs. Becker and her husband would
+kiss, the unexcited matrimonial peck of the taken-for-granted which
+is as sane to the taste as egg, and as flat, and then the
+night-in-and-night-out question that for Lilly, rigid there behind the
+door, never failed to thrill through her in little darts.
+
+"Where is Lilly, Carrie?"
+
+MRS. BECKER (assuming an immediate mask of vacuity): "Why, I don't know,
+Ben. She was here a minute ago."
+
+"Well, well, well!" looking under the bed, under the little cot drawn
+across its baseboard and into a V of a back space created by a
+catacorner bureau. "Well, well, well! What could have happened to her?"
+
+At this juncture Lilly, fairly titillating, would burst out and before
+his carefully averted glance fling wide her arms in self-revelation.
+
+"Here I am, papa!"
+
+"Well, I'll declare, so she is!" lifting her by the armpits for a kiss.
+"Well, well, well!"
+
+"Papa, I got ninety in arithmetic. I'd have got a hundred, but I got the
+wrong common denominator."
+
+"That's right, Lilly. Keep up well in your studies. Remember, knowledge
+is power."
+
+"Get your father's velveteen coat, Lilly."
+
+"Papa, Ella McBride kisses boys."
+
+"Then don't ever let me hear of your associating with her. The little
+girl that doesn't keep her own self-respect cannot expect others to
+respect her."
+
+"And you ought to see, papa, she always rides her tricycle down past
+Eddie Posner's house on Delmar just to show herself off to him."
+
+"Lilly, go wash your hands for supper. How is business, Ben?"
+
+"Nothing extra, Carrie."
+
+"Oh, I get so tired hearing a poor mouth. Sometimes I could just scream
+for wanting to do things we are not in a position to do. Go
+housekeeping, for instance, have a little home of my own--"
+
+"Now, now, little woman," at the invariable business of flecking his
+neat gray business suit with a whisk broom, "you got up on the wrong
+side of bed this morning. Lilly, suppose you shine papa's spectacles
+for him."
+
+"There is the supper bell. Quick, Ben and Lilly, before the Kembles."
+
+The dining room, directly over the basement kitchen, jutted in an ell
+off the rear of the house so that from the back parlor it was not
+difficult to precede the immediate overhead response to that bell. A
+black-faced genii of the bowl and weal, in a very dubiously white-duck
+coat thrust on hurriedly over clothing reminiscent of the day's window
+washing and furnace cinders, held attitude in among the small tables
+that littered the room. There were four. A long table seating ten and
+punctuated by two sets of cruets, two plates of bread, and two
+white-china water pitchers; Mr. Hazzard's tiny square of individual
+table, a perpetual bottle of brown medicine beside his place. The
+Kembles also enjoyed segregation from the mother table, the family
+invariably straggling in one by one. For the Beckers was reserved the
+slight bulge of bay window that looked out upon the Suburban street-car
+tracks and a battalion of unpainted woodsheds. A red geranium, potted
+and wrapped around in green crepe tissue paper, sprouted center table, a
+small bottle of jam and two condiments lending further distinction. A
+napkin with self-invented fasteners dangled from Mr. Becker's chair, and
+beside Lilly's place a sterling silver and privately owned knife and
+fork, monogrammed.
+
+To Mr. Becker, the negro race was largely and genetically christened
+Gawge, to be addressed solely in native patois.
+
+"Evenin', Gawge."
+
+"Evenin', Mistah Beckah."
+
+"George, are you going to take good care of my husband to-night? That
+piece of steak you served him yesterday wasn't fit to eat."
+
+"Law now, Mis' Beckah, kin I help it if de best de kitchen has ain't
+none too good?"
+
+"Don't tell me! I saw the piece you brought Mr. Kemble."
+
+"Now, Carrie ..."
+
+"What have we to-night, George?"
+
+"Fried steak, lamb, or corn'-beef hash."
+
+"Bring us steak, and if it isn't tender, tell Mrs. Schum for me that
+right back downstairs it goes! A little piece of lamb on the side in
+case Miss Lilly don't like the steak, and bring up a dish of those sweet
+pickles. You know, under the tray the way you always do. There's a pair
+of Mr. Becker's old shoes, good as new, waiting to be given away."
+
+"Carrie!"
+
+"Miss Lilly loves pickles. George, do as I say."
+
+"Carrie!"
+
+"Law! Mistah Beckah, I knows Mis' Beckah and her ways. Law! I doan take
+no offense."
+
+"I wish if you want extras, Carrie, you would buy them. It is a darn
+shame to make yourself so small before the other boarders."
+
+"I haven't as much money as you have, Ben Becker. I'm not ashamed to ask
+for my money's worth. Lilly, haven't I told you not to talk on your
+fingers at meals?"
+
+This form of digital communication between the children of the boarding
+house seemed to break out in its most virulent form at dinner. In spite
+of a sharp consensus of parental disapproval, there was a continual
+flashing of code between Lilly, the Kemble twins, and Lester Eli at the
+larger table.
+
+"Ben, will you speak to Lilly? She won't mind me."
+
+"Lilly!"
+
+"Yes, sir," immediately subsiding to a contemplation of the geranium.
+
+Poker played for penny stakes was a favorite after-dinner pastime. A
+group including Mrs. Eli, the Kembles, and Mr. Hazzard would gather in
+the Becker back parlor, Mrs. Becker, relieved of corsets and in a
+dark-blue foulard teagown shotted all over with tiny pink rosebuds,
+presiding over a folding table with a glass bowl of the "baby pretzels"
+in its center.
+
+The children meanwhile would forgather on the front hall stairs, the
+peaked flare of an olive of gaslight that burned through a red glass
+globe with warts blown into it, bathing the little group in a sort of
+greasy fluid. Roy and Flora Kemble, Snow Horton, Lester Eli, and Stanley
+Beinenstock, racked with bronchitis and lending an odor of creosote,
+Lilly, and even Harry in his poor outlandish blouse.
+
+"Snow, tell us a story; you're the oldest."
+
+Snow was full of lore; would invoke inspiration with a very wide and
+very blue gaze up to the ceiling, her thin hands clasping her thin neck.
+
+"Once upon a time--once upon a time there was the most beautiful girl
+in all the world and her name was--"
+
+"Aw, give us one about boys."
+
+LILLY: "You shut up, Roy Kemble. I guess Snow can tell a girl story if
+she wants to. Go on, Snow, 'once upon a time there was the most
+beautiful girl in all the world' and she had honey-colored curls and--"
+
+"I didn't say she had honey-colored curls. Honey! Who ever heard of a
+girl having honey curls?"
+
+"Well, she had."
+
+"Didn't."
+
+"Did."
+
+"--and her name was--was--Gladys."
+
+"Oh no, Snow, call her--"
+
+"I think Gladys is just a beautiful name for a girl," ventured Flora
+Kemble on this occasion. "I like Elsie, too. I think Elsie Dinsmore is
+my favorite name."
+
+"Elsie Dinsmore!" flared Lilly. "Girls aren't pokey like her any more."
+
+Thus diverted, there ensued a quick confetti of flung opinions.
+
+"Minn is a pretty name."
+
+"That's because you're stuck on Minnie Duganne in your class. Oh-oh, Roy
+is stuck on Minnie Duganne!"
+
+"Arabella--I just love that name. Don't you, Lilly?"
+
+"If I was a girl, I would be named Mamma-Annie."
+
+"Shut up, Harry; and, say, you better take back that can opener. You
+stole it off Mr. Hazzard's dresser."
+
+"What is your favorite name, Lilly?"
+
+Her eyes on the warts blown into the glass globe, hugging her knees in
+their sturdy ribbed stockings, her smooth brown hair enhancing her clean
+kind of prettiness, Lilly gazed up roundly.
+
+"I choose," she said, mouthing grandiloquently, her little pink tongue
+waving like a clapper--"I choose--choose--ah--Zoe!"
+
+"That isn't a name!"
+
+"'Tis so."
+
+"Who ever heard of a girl named Zoe! You never did yourself."
+
+"I know I never did, Roy Kemble, but just the same I think it is the
+most beautiful name in the world. It isn't so much what it really means;
+names don't have to mean anything--it's what it feels like it means. To
+me the name Zoe feels like it means--means--"
+
+CHORUS: "She don't know what it means. She don't know what it means."
+
+"She means doe! The doe in the zoo at Forest Park. Hauh-hauh--her
+favorite name is Doe."
+
+"Zoe," repeated Lilly, her eyes in a trance and lakes of reflected
+vision. "Zoe--it means--it means something--something full of life.
+Life--free--to me Zoe means free! Life!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+When Lilly was fourteen she graduated from grade school, second in her
+class.
+
+"It's an outrage," said Mrs. Becker. "Miss Lare always did pick on the
+child."
+
+"I'd rather have been last than second," said Lilly, trying to keep firm
+a lip that would tremble.
+
+"Never mind, Lilly, you'll have the prettiest graduation dress of them
+all. I've got Katy Stutz engaged for three days in the house. A girl
+don't have to be so smart."
+
+"I'd rather have the valedictory address than--clothes," still very
+uncertain of lip.
+
+"Of course. That is because for a child you certainly have crazy ideas.
+Why don't you nag your father a little with what you've been nagging me
+all week?"
+
+"I--Not now, mamma."
+
+"Why not now? All I've got to say about it is, if he is willing, I am."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Tell him, Lilly."
+
+"I--You see, papa, I thought if only you would let me begin vocal
+lessons, now that I am going to High School. Not real singing, papa--I'm
+too young for that--but just the foundation for voice."
+
+"She wants to study with Max Rinehardt, Ben. I say it can't do any harm
+for the child to learn parlor singing. I think I can manage it at a
+dollar and a half a lesson. The elocution I say 'No' to. We don't need
+any play-acting in the family."
+
+"Why--er--I'm surprised, Lilly, that you should have your heart set on
+that kind of thing. Seems to me a young girl could find something more
+worth while than that. Singers never amount to much."
+
+"Oh, papa, it's what I want most in the world."
+
+"Let her have them. A little parlor singing helps any girl with the
+young men. I notice you courted me from the choir. If she waits for
+encouragement from you, her accomplishments won't amount to a row
+of pins."
+
+"You see, papa, I'm going to take the commercial course at High and
+learn stenography and typewriting, so it will just balance my
+education fine."
+
+"Well, little woman, whatever you say."
+
+"You know what I say."
+
+"Don't you think she is a bit too young?"
+
+Mimetically: "No, I don't think she's a bit too young. The sooner you
+wake up to the fact that your daughter is growing up, the better. She's
+a graduate already from grammar school."
+
+"Papa, I'm on the graduating program."
+
+"For what, daughter?"
+
+"A piano solo. 'Alice,' with variations."
+
+"Well, Carrie, if that is the way you feel about it--if you think those
+kind of lessons are good for her--"
+
+"That is the way I feel about it."
+
+These little acid places occurring somewhere in almost every day hardly
+corroded into Lilly's accustomed consciousness. If they etched their way
+at all into Mr. Becker's patient kind of equanimity, the utter quietude
+of his personality, which could efface itself behind a newspaper for two
+or even three hours at a time, never revealed it. His was the stolidity
+of an oak, tickled rather than assailed by a bright-eyed woodpecker.
+
+"Little woman" he liked to call her in his nearest approach of
+endearment, although it must have been her petite quickness rather than
+a diminutive quality that earned the appellation. Even when he had wooed
+her in Granite City, Missouri, and she had sung down at the quiet-faced
+youth from a choir loft, she was after the then prevalent form of
+hourglass girlish loveliness. Now she was rather enormous of bust,
+proudly so, and wore her waist pulled in so that her hips sprang out
+roundly. A common gesture was to place her hands on her hips, press
+down, and breathe sharply inward, thus holding herself for the moment
+from the steel walls of her corsets. Their removal immediately after
+dinner was a ritual to be anticipated during the day. She would sit in
+her underbodice, unhooked of them, sunk softly into herself, her hands
+stroking her tortured jacket of ribs and her breath flowing deeper.
+
+"I don't believe I'd pull in quite so tight, Carrie, if I were you. It
+will tell on your health some day."
+
+"You don't catch me with a sloppy figure. I don't give a row of pins for
+the woman without some curve to her."
+
+To Mrs. Becker a row of pins was the basest coinage of any realm. It ran
+through her speech in pricking idiom.
+
+She was piquant enough of face, quick-eyed, and with little pointy
+features enhanced by a psyche worn as emphatically as an exclamation
+point on the very top of her head. On eucher or matinee days her bangs,
+at the application of a curling iron, were worn frizzed, but usually
+they were pinned back beneath the psyche in straight brown wisps.
+
+As she grew older, Lilly came more and more to resemble her father in a
+certain tight knit of figure, length of limb, and quiet gray eyes that
+could fill blackly with pupil and in the smooth, straight, always
+gleaming brown hair growing cleanly and with the merest of widows' peaks
+off her forehead.
+
+At fourteen she stood shoulder to shoulder with her mother, and their
+gloves and shirt waists were interchangeable. One really distinguishing
+loveliness was her complexion. The skin flowed over her body with the
+cool fleshliness of a pink rose petal. There was a natural shimmer to
+it, a dewiness and a pollen of youth that enveloped her like a caress.
+
+"Looks more like her father, if she looks like either of them," Mrs.
+Schum was fond of saying, "and she has his easy disposition. But there
+is a child who runs deep. If she was mine I'd educate her to be
+something. Ah me, if only my Annie hadn't lost her head and married, she
+had the makings, too."
+
+As a matter of fact, Lilly's resemblance to her parents stopped
+abruptly. Her first year in High School, a course in natural science
+revealed to her the term "botanical sport."
+
+"That's what I am," she determined, with youth's immediate application
+of cosmos to self, "a botanical sport." A spontaneous variation from the
+normal type. "Papa, I learned to-day that I'm a sport."
+
+MRS. BECKER: "A what? That _is_ a genteel expression for a young girl to
+apply to herself! That High School does you more harm than good."
+
+"But, mamma, it's a term used in botany. A term from Darwin."
+
+"Darwin! That's a fine thing to teach children in school--that they come
+from monkeys! No wonder children haven't any respect for their parents
+nowadays."
+
+"Well, just the same it is in the biology. We're on frogs now. You ought
+to see the way frogs get born!"
+
+"In my day children weren't taught such stuff. I'm surprised, Ben, it's
+allowed."
+
+Across the biology of life, as if to shut out the loathsome facts of an
+abattoir, a curtain of dreadful portent was drawn before Lilly's
+clear eyes.
+
+"When baby came," was Mrs. Becker's insinuation for the naked and
+impolite fact of birth.
+
+In a vague, inchoate sort of way, Lilly at sixteen was visualizing
+nature procreant as an abominable woman creature standing shank deep in
+spongy swampland and from behind that portentous curtain moaning in the
+agonized key of Mrs. Kemble.
+
+About this time Mrs. Kemble's third child was within a few weeks of
+birth.
+
+"Mamma, what makes Mrs. Kemble look so funny!"
+
+"Hush, Lilly. Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again.
+Little girls shouldn't ask such questions."
+
+One night shortly after, a cry that tore like a gash through the
+sleeping boarding house roused Lilly to a sitting posture on her little
+cot drawn across the baseboard of her parents' bed.
+
+"Mamma! Papa! What was that?"
+
+There were immediate voices and running up and down stairs and more
+cries that beat the air and Mrs. Becker already up and clamoring into
+her kimono.
+
+"Sh-h-h, Lilly! Go back to sleep. It is nothing but Mrs. Kemble not
+feeling very well. I'll run upstairs a minute, Ben. See that Lilly goes
+back to sleep."
+
+Until the break of day Lilly lay tense there on her little cot, toes
+curled in, and still her mother did not return. Time and time again the
+moans rose to shrieks of dreadful supplication that set her to trembling
+so that her cot rattled against the baseboard.
+
+"Kill me! God! Put me out of it! Please! I can't suffer any more! Kill
+me, God! Kill me!"
+
+"Papa, I--I'm scared."
+
+"Go to sleep, Lilly," said her father from the pool of darkness, his
+voice rather thin and sick. "Go to sleep now, like a good girl."
+
+In a little area of quiet that ensued, she did drop healthily off,
+wakening to the warmth of sunshine, her father already departed, her
+mother rocking and sewing beside the window.
+
+"Mamma, why didn't you wake me? I'll be late to school."
+
+"You won't if you hurry and--and, Lilly, what do you think?"
+
+"What, mamma?"
+
+"The stork brought Flora and Roy the dearest little baby sister last
+night. They're going to call her Evelyn. That's why Roy and Flora went
+to spend the week with their Aunt Emma, so they wouldn't frighten the
+stork away when he flew in with it. In a few days you can go up and see
+it. Isn't that nice, Lilly?"
+
+Still tousled with sleep, but the red rising up out of the yoke of her
+nightgown, Lilly answered, with averted face, "Yes, mamma."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+This episode marked the beginning of what was to be a three years'
+refrain.
+
+"Ben, we must go housekeeping. It's an outrage to board, with a girl
+Lilly's age. Not as much as a parlor for her to bring her friends, and a
+great big girl like her without a room to herself! It's not even
+delicate."
+
+"Well, Carrie, I'm willing."
+
+"I know, until the time comes. I don't forget so easily the way you
+sighed all night in your sleep that time I came near renting the house
+on Delmar Avenue. Where is the money coming from! The minute that old
+business down there earns a penny, right back into it go the earnings,
+instead of drawing out a few dollars for the comfort of his family, like
+any other man would."
+
+"But, Carrie--"
+
+"There is not another woman in the world would stand for it but me. A
+woman that could enjoy a little home of her own as much as I! What do I
+get out of it, I'd like to know! Stint. Stint. Stint. Shove it all back
+into that old rope-and-twine business down there that doesn't show a
+cent of capital when you take stock except in rope, rope, rope, until
+I'd like to hang myself with some of it."
+
+"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed this morning.
+Just hold your horses. These are tight times, I admit, but we have
+our health--"
+
+"I've heard that since I'm married. Health! Suppose we have got our
+health. We can't thank the business for that."
+
+"Lilly, your mother certainly got up on the wrong side of bed this
+morning, didn't she?"
+
+"Well, it's right discouraging, if you ask me."
+
+"You're all right, little woman."
+
+"Yes, I know," trying not to smile, "I'm all right when it don't cost
+nothing and when it comes to the dirty work of trying to make two
+ends meet."
+
+"You're certainly a splendid manager. No one can take that away from
+you."
+
+"Well, I wish you would both appreciate it a little more."
+
+"We do appreciate it, don't we, Lilly?"
+
+"Yes, papa."
+
+Her second year in High School, Lilly was kept out for five weeks by an
+attack of typhoid fever.
+
+An aversion for physical shortcoming, from her mother's occasional
+headaches to the mortally afflicted Mr. Hazzard with the great chronic
+sore crisscrossed with court plaster at the end of one of his eyes,
+amounted in Lilly to something actually Indian.
+
+"Oh, mamma, if I had a headache, I wouldn't always be talking about it.
+People aren't interested."
+
+"I'm going to tell your father when he comes home to-night what a
+sympathetic daughter I have. If ever I fall sick the City Hospital will
+be the place for me. When I see the way that Flora Kemble carries her
+mother around and the way my own daughter sympathizes with me. If I
+don't tell your father this night!"
+
+It was this queer little congenital urge that kept Lilly on her feet for
+two weeks after the malady had hold of her. With a stoicism that taxed
+her cruelly, she would march smilingly off to school, a bombardment of
+pains shooting through her head, her hands and tongue dry, a ball and
+chain of inertia dragging at her ankles.
+
+"Lilly, what is the matter? Why don't you eat your bread and butter
+after school? Has Mrs. Schum said anything?"
+
+"No, no, mamma. I'm not hungry, that's all."
+
+"Funny. Open the closet. There is a basket of oranges behind your
+father's overcoat, and a bag of baby pretzels, too."
+
+"Goodness! mamma, if I was hungry, I'd eat."
+
+"Don't you feel well, Lilly?"
+
+"Of course I feel well, mamma. Why shouldn't I?"
+
+But next day, at her after-school hour of practice, a small discordant
+crash broke suddenly in upon "Chaminade's Scarf Dance" and Mrs. Becker's
+rhythmic rocking above. Lilly had fainted, with her head in her arms and
+face down among the keys.
+
+Followed two weeks that crowded up the little back parlor with anxiety,
+the tension of two doctors in consultation, and a sense of hysteria that
+was always just a scratch beneath the surface of Mrs. Becker. She would
+break suddenly into loud and unexpected fits of crying, crushing her
+palms up against her mouth; would waken from a light doze beside the
+bed, on the shriek of a nightmare, and have literally to be dragged from
+the room. She harassed the doctors with questions that only the course
+of the disease could answer.
+
+The crisis came in the watches of the night, Lilly very straight and
+very white and light of breathing in the center of her parents' bed, her
+glossy hair in a thick plait over each shoulder, her fine white and
+developed chest hardly rising.
+
+"O God! help me to live this night! Ben! Ben!"
+
+"Carrie, you're only making yourself sick and not helping the child."
+
+"My baby! My beautiful snow-white baby! The best child that ever lived!
+Help me to live this night!"
+
+"Carrie, little woman, if only you won't take on so. There's every
+reason to hope for the best. The doctor assured us."
+
+"How long before we know? Go get Doctor Allison over. Ask Roy Kemble to
+run over to Horton's and telephone for Doctor Birch. I want them
+here. My baby!"
+
+"Carrie, Carrie, haven't they told you time and time again there is
+nothing they can do now? Don't antagonize Doctor Birch by calling him
+over here again to-night. Everything is being done for the child. Now
+all we can do is to sit and wait and hope for the best."
+
+"You don't care! You're made of iron. At a time like this you stop to
+consider the doctors' feelings. Mine don't count. My baby. Get well,
+Lilly. Mamma's been cross at times, but never again. We'll do everything
+to make you happy. You can read your eyes out and mamma won't turn out
+the light on you. Mamma will buy you books and a box of paints and a
+little bird's-eye-maple room all your own. Lilly, mamma's baby. We're
+going housekeeping--your own piano--your own room. Aren't we, Ben?
+Aren't we?"
+
+"Yes, Carrie."
+
+"You can take your choice, baby, of all the things you want to be. Mamma
+won't oppose any more, or papa. Opera singing if you want it. You come
+by it naturally from my choir voice. Whatever you say, baby. Even an
+actress and all the elocution and singing lessons you--"
+
+"Carrie!"
+
+"Oh, you don't care! You're only her father. What does a father know?
+You don't care."
+
+Against this age-old indictment of paternity, and absolutely without
+precedent, the patient, the iron-gray head of Mr. Becker fell forward, a
+fearful and silent storm of sobs beating against his repression.
+
+Full of dumfounded hysteria, walking on her knees around the bed edge to
+him, Mrs. Becker drew down his head into the wreath of her arms, kissing
+into it, mingling her tears with his, and tasting their anguish.
+
+"My darling! Ben--please, darling! I say a lot of things I don't mean.
+You are my husband--and my life. Ben--don't! I can't stand it! Ben!"
+
+At six o'clock Lilly opened her eyes. They were clear and cool and the
+petal-like quality was out on her skin.
+
+"Sweet Alice," she said, "oh, Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt," a bit of dream
+floating up with her like seaweed to the surface of consciousness.
+"Sweet Alice."
+
+She had been reading _Trilby_, surreptitiously filched from Mrs.
+Kemble's stack of novels.
+
+"Lilly--mamma's Lilly!"
+
+"Where--I--Where--"
+
+"In your own room, sweetheart, and your own mother and father beside
+you."
+
+"I thought--Sweet Alice--"
+
+"The fever is gone now, Lilly. You won't have any of those thoughts any
+more. Go to sleep now, papa's girl."
+
+"I must have been singing--'Faust'--what makes you and papa--so
+angry--with me--dears?"
+
+"We're not, Lilly. Nothing makes us angry any more."
+
+She was too tired to smile.
+
+"I kept dreaming, mamma, that my hair was two big honey-colored braids
+all wound up with pearls, like Marguerite's picture in _Stories of
+the Operas_."
+
+"Go to sleep, Lilly, like a good child. Our girl has got too much sense
+to fill her head up with such nonsense."
+
+"No, no, papa, I won't have common sense. I want to ride up to meet the
+sun, like the princess in--"
+
+"She wants to what? Are you sure her fever is gone, Carrie?"
+
+"Nonsense! It is stuff she reads in her fairy tales. Yes, darling,
+anything you want."
+
+"You know, mamma--pearls--in my hair--"
+
+"Yes, yes, darling. Sh-h-h!"
+
+"Mamma?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We're middle-class, aren't we?"
+
+"What does she mean?"
+
+"Middle-class people, I mean. You know."
+
+"Why, yes, dear, we're middle-class. I guess that is what you'd call it.
+What an idea!"
+
+"Help me."
+
+"Yes, yes. How, baby? The doctor will be here any--"
+
+"You don't know what I mean. No matter what I say, you don't know what I
+mean. Isn't that terrible?"
+
+"Help you to get well, that's what mamma and papa are going to do."
+
+"No, no, no! Help me--out--up!"
+
+Presently Lilly fell asleep. To her watching parents her light and
+regular breathing took on the meter of a Doxology.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Center High School, the city's only at a time when half a million souls
+beat up like sea around it, a model and modern institution that was
+presently and paradoxically to become architectural paragon for what to
+avoid in future high-school buildings, was again within street-car
+distance, except on usually bland days, when Lilly and Flora Kemble
+would walk home through Vandaventer Place, the first of those short,
+private thoroughfares of pretentious homes that were presently to run
+through the warp of the city like threads of gold.
+
+On these homeward walks Flora and Lilly, who referred to each other as
+"my chum," were fond of peripatetically exchanging the views, the
+consciousness, and the sweetness of sixteen.
+
+"If you had your choice, Lilly, what house would you select for yours in
+Vandaventer Place?"
+
+"None."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I don't want to live in between stone gates with 'No Thoroughfare'
+stuck on each end."
+
+"You're the funniest girl! What do you mean, 'No thoroughfare'? Don't
+you want to be exclusive and private?"
+
+"Yes, but a person can be private somewhere high--high--not just stuck
+between gates like everybody else. Sappho always sat on a balcony that
+overlooked the Aegean Sea."
+
+"Maybe she did, and she jumped off, too, but I'm not talking to-day's
+Greek history lesson. I'm talking about regular folks. Between the gates
+of Vandaventer Place would be good enough for me. Wouldn't I just love
+to be mistress over one of these houses and give parties with an awning
+stretched out over the sidewalk!"
+
+"What did you get in algebra, Flora?"
+
+"B plus. And you?"
+
+"B minus."
+
+"Lilly Becker, that is the fifth B minus you've had in succession. I'm
+going to call you Lilly Minus."
+
+"If she hadn't sprung that old oral exam on us--"
+
+"Oh, if ifs and ands were pots and pans!"
+
+Flora, rather freckly, elbowy, and far too tall, was none the less about
+to be pretty. She was frailly fair, like her mother, and could already
+throw her blue eyes about their balls, in the Esperanto of coquetry. She
+had a treacherous little faculty of appearing never to study and yet
+maintaining an excellent grade of scholarship.
+
+"You get me to do all sorts of things with you, Flora, and then you
+sneak off and study on the quiet and leave me to flunk because I
+promised you I wouldn't study, either."
+
+"Why, Lilly Becker, I never studied one minute for that algebra quiz."
+
+"You did so! When I went downstairs to write in my Friendship Book, like
+you said you were going to do, you worked your algebra instead. Roy
+told me."
+
+"Well, if I was as pretty as you, Lilly, I wouldn't ever care if I got
+my lessons or not," said Flora, to palliate.
+
+"Flora Kemble, I'm not pretty!"
+
+"You are, too. Everybody says your complexion is like peaches and
+cream, and look at mine, all freckles."
+
+"Complexion, huh! If I had your yellow hair, you could have all my
+complexion."
+
+"Boys hate freckles because so many of them have them themselves."
+
+"Always boys. Honestly, you're boy-crazy, Flora."
+
+"Well, I like that. Can I help it if I got an invitation and you didn't?
+You sat right next to him in English and I sat two whole seats away."
+
+A cloud no larger and smudgier than a high-school boy's hand had dropped
+its first shadow between them. Eugene Bankhead, son of the credit man
+for Slocum-Hines, the city's largest wholesale hardware firm, had
+suddenly, out of this clear sky, invited Flora to the Thanksgiving Day
+football game between Center High and an exclusive local academy. A new
+estate felt, rather than spoken, quickened the eye and authority of
+Flora. A sense of it rode on the air waves between them.
+
+"I hate boys."
+
+"How do you know? You've never seen any except my brother and
+sneak-thief Harry."
+
+"Papa says if a girl begins to run around with boys too soon it makes
+her so forward that by the time she's eighteen she's too old
+and faded--"
+
+"That's old-fogy talk."
+
+"You mean it's old fogy for girls to let boys jam everything else out of
+their heads. I'd like to see the boy that could make me forget my--my
+ambitions."
+
+"If Eugene had asked you instead of me you wouldn't be saying that."
+
+"Anyway, I hate snips. I like men--real men."
+
+"Oh, I know. You're stuck on Lindsley!"
+
+A violent splash of red and a highly superlative denial of word and
+manner laid hold of Lilly.
+
+"Why, Flora Kemble!"
+
+"Look at her blushing. Oh, what I know about you!"
+
+"You fibber. I think he's the limit. I never saw a fellow so stuck on
+himself."
+
+"Oh, I know! I know now why you carry home twice as many books as you
+used to since he got charge of the library."
+
+"I'm reading the _Lady of the Lake_ and you know it. That's why I
+stopped in to-night."
+
+"I know why you're always writing compositions since you have him in
+English. Lilly's stuck on Lindsley."
+
+Tears were rare with Lilly, but a tremor waved her voice.
+
+"I think you're horrid, Flora Kemble. Anyway, he's more worth while
+being stuck on than Eugene Bankhead. He's just--just middle-class. His
+future is to work in Slocum-Hines's hardware store, like his father."
+
+"Well, that's more of a man's job than sitting around in a schoolroom
+doing lady's work. Papa says Eugene's father is a five-thousand-a-year
+man. Eugene has all the spending money he wants and they have a
+conservatory in their house."
+
+"Well, I'd rather be Lindsley than Eugene; besides, he's a kid hardly
+out of short trousers."
+
+"Silly, you don't think it's Eugene I'm stuck on, do you? His brother
+Vincent is a big man down at Slocum-Hines's, too, and a catch. I'm going
+to meet him some day. Lindsley! Ugh! I like a little sponduliks thrown
+in with a fellow. Lindsley's elbows shine."
+
+For the most part the Board of Education drew upon the offspring of its
+own system for teaching talent, occasionally letting in an artery of new
+blood. Lilly's second year in High School such an infusion took place in
+the form of one H. Horace Lindsley, the young master of arts, his degree
+rather heavy upon him, dawning blondly and behind high-power pince-nez
+upon the English department.
+
+Sweet sixteen capitulated to English literature. The double wave of Mr.
+Lindsley's hair, the intellectual rush of very long, white teeth to the
+front, somehow mitigating for the sins of a curriculum that could
+present Gorboduc, and _Friar Bacon_ and _Friar Bungay_, to young minds
+illy furrowed for such seed.
+
+Notwithstanding the literary odor with which Mr. Lindsley sprayed
+himself as he sprayed his handkerchief with a domestic scent called
+"Sesame and Lilies," his neoclassic determination to write the American
+_Iliad_ must have died painlessly when his iambically disposed feet
+ventured too deeply into the quagmire of pedagogy, from which he was not
+to emerge. But for the first time in her life Lilly was hearing her name
+pronounced by one who rolled it under his tongue like a lollypop. He
+rolled all names quite so, but in her beatitude she was only conscious
+of her own as it candied. Besides, his eyes, through the pince-nez, had
+a gimlet, goosefleshing quality; he recited "Straits of Dover" to a
+class of young women with rapt adenoidal expression when he should have
+been inoculating them with the bitter serum of Burke's Conciliation
+Speech, and walked to school of wintry mornings without an overcoat;
+skates and the _Areopagitica_ under his arm.
+
+It was undeniable that at this stage Lilly had veered unaccountably to
+authorship, her after-school practice hour gouged into by a suddenly
+stimulated pen.
+
+"Papa, I know my ambition!"
+
+Mr. Becker let fall his newspaper to his knee, glancing up over the rim
+of his reading glasses.
+
+"What's it now, daughter?"
+
+"I want to be a writer. You know, an author of stories. My English
+teacher says I have talent. I get A minus on all my essays, and to-day
+he wrote on the edge of one, 'Quite a literary touch.'"
+
+MRS. BECKER (who rocked as she darned): "The trouble with you, Lilly, is
+that you have it too good. You don't know what you want."
+
+"You don't care if I am a writer, do you, papa?"
+
+"Last week it was the stage, and last month the opera, and now it's
+writing. What next, I wonder?"
+
+"Your mother's right. There's no stability to this art business, Lilly.
+They're a loose lot that never come to a good end."
+
+"Well, just the same," cried Lilly, hot with a sense of futility and
+rebellion, "your own father was the next thing to an actor. Preaching is
+kin to acting."
+
+"Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again. Your grandfather
+was a God-fearing, not a play-acting man." Attacking this subject, a
+little furrow would invariably appear between Mr. Becker's fine gray
+eyes and his lips express bitter intolerance for a world that translated
+itself to him solely in terms of pink tights.
+
+Not that the odor of religion lay any too heavily on Lilly's youth.
+Sunday school was not enforced, Sabbath ethics were observed loosely, if
+at all, but a yearly membership in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church was
+maintained, not without remonstrance from Mrs. Becker.
+
+"I don't see why we belong. If I want to attend church on Easter Sunday
+or a Christmas, I don't have to pay dues all year for it. A person can
+pray just as well at home as in church if he's inclined that way."
+
+"Our child doesn't need to be raised like a heathen just because we
+aren't as regular as we might be about churchgoing. Besides, when
+trouble comes we don't want to be buried like heathens, either."
+
+"Calamity howler."
+
+"In England, papa, writers get buried in Westminster Abbey. If I lived
+in England, that would be my ambition."
+
+"The child has ambitions even about funerals. I bought you goods for a
+navy-blue poplin to-day, Lilly. Gentle's had a sale."
+
+"Oh, mamma, can you get Katy Stutz to come in time to make it for
+auditorium next Friday? Mr. Lindsley may call on me to read my essay
+out loud."
+
+"That Mr. Lindsley makes me sick. You're a changed child since he's come
+to that school. Mrs. Foote said the same thing of Estelle at the euchre
+yesterday. All the girls want new dresses and to be in his classes."
+
+"Why, mamma!" coloring up.
+
+"Oh, run over to Pirney's and buy me a postal card. I'll write Katy
+Stutz to take Mrs. Foote's days away from her and give them to me."
+
+By small briberies employed without sense of compromise, Mrs. Becker had
+a way with those who served her. Katy Stutz, an old soul as lean and as
+green as a cotton umbrella, had sewed at minimum wage through fourteen
+years of keeping Lilly daintily and a bit too pretentiously clad.
+Willie, Mrs. Schum's old negro cook, who wore her feet wrapped in gunny
+sacking, and every odd and end that came down in the day's waste
+baskets, from empty spools to nubs of pencil, stored away in the kink of
+her hair, would somehow invariably send up the giblets along with the
+Beckers' Sunday allotment of chicken. Mr. Keebil, too, an old Southern
+relic, his head covered with suds of gray astrakhan and a laugh like the
+up and down of rusty bedsprings, for ten years had presided over the
+hirsute destinies of Lilly and her mother. Bi-monthly he arrived on his
+shampooing mission, often making a day's tour throughout the
+boarding house.
+
+"Mr. Keebil, don't you do the Kembles' heads first to-day. That's the
+way with you people. I get you all your customers and then you neglect
+me for them."
+
+"Law! Mrs. Beckah, how cum you think that? Don't I give you and Miss
+Lilly shampoos for two bits when I chawges Mrs. Kemble three heads for
+a dollar?"
+
+"Yes, but what about the underwear and socks of Mr. Becker's that you
+get?"
+
+"I allas say I 'ain't got no bettah friend than Mrs. Beckah. That was
+certainly a fine suit you done give me las' time, except for the
+buttons cut off."
+
+"You should consider yourself lucky to get a head like Miss Lilly's to
+take care of at any price. Just look at it--like spun silk."
+
+He would fluff out the really beautiful cascade of smooth and highly
+electric hair, his brown hands, so strangely light pink of palm, full of
+pride in their task.
+
+"Law! Miss Lilly, if you ain't going to grow up the pick of them all."
+
+"Ouch! Mr. Keebil, you hurt!" cried Lilly, ever tender of scalp.
+
+Nor was Mrs. Becker above a bit of persiflage.
+
+"Mr. Keebil, I hear it is something scandalous the way you and Willie
+are setting up to each other."
+
+The old shoulders would shake, the face crinkle into a raisin, and the
+little spade of gray beard heave to the springy laughter.
+
+"Law! Mrs. Beckah. if you ain't the greatest one to joke."
+
+"Joke nothing. It's a fine match. A good upstanding church member like
+you and a fine-looking woman like Willie."
+
+Lilly would turn a quirking but disapproving eye upon her mother.
+
+"Mamma, haven't you anything better to do?"
+
+"Law! Miss Lilly, me and your ma we understand each other. Me and your
+papa we know she will have her little joke but the heart is there.
+That's what counts on the Lord's Judgment Day--the heart."
+
+Lilly's poplin frock was completed for the Friday auditorium exercises.
+Her two braids, now consolidated into one hempy rope, lay against her
+back, finishing without completement of hair ribbon into a cylinder of
+brushed-around-the-finger curl. It was a little mannerism of hers, not
+entirely unconscious, to fling the heavy coil of hair over one shoulder.
+It enhanced her face, somehow, the fall of shining plait down over her
+young bosom. Contrary to her choking expectation, she was not called
+upon to read, but to sit on the platform in an honorable-mention row
+of five.
+
+Flora Kemble read a B-plus paper, largely and in immaculate vertical
+penmanship, entitled "Friendship," Lilly, the tourniquet twist at her
+heart, sitting by. Her name was read later among the honorable five,
+true to manner, Mr. Lindsley seeming to caress it with his tongue.
+
+"Miss Halpern. Mr. Prothero. Miss Foote. Miss Deidesheimer. Miss
+Beck-er."
+
+From where she sat Lilly could see the slightly protuberant shine to his
+teeth, the intellectual ride of glasses along his thin nose, the long,
+nervous hand with a little-finger fraternity ring.
+
+Her own hands were very cold, her cheeks very pink. She had a pressing
+behind the eyes of a not-to-be-endured impulse of wanting to cry. His
+reading of her name was a hot javelin through the pit of her being.
+
+After the exercises and as school was in dismissal she saw him hurrying
+out of a side door with a tennis racket. It seemed suddenly intolerable
+that walk home through Vandaventer Place to her boarding-house world.
+
+Flora's perceptions were small and quick.
+
+"Why, Lilly, your cheeks are as red as anything and you're getting a
+fever blister. Somebody kissed you!"
+
+Her hand flew to her mouth almost guiltily, as if to the feel of lips
+slightly protuberant.
+
+"Why--Oh, you horrid girl!"
+
+"It was Lind! Lind!"
+
+"Lind--what--who?"
+
+"Lindsley, of course," dipping with laughter.
+
+"Flora Kemble, I'll never speak to you again. You're stuck on him
+yourself and trying to put it on to me."
+
+"Me stuck on him, the way his teeth stick out! No poor school-teacher
+for mine!"
+
+"You're boy-crazy. I'm not."
+
+But that night for the first time in her life Lilly lay through a
+sleepless hour, staring up into the darkness. The blanket irked her and
+she plunged it off, burrowing one cheek and then the other into her
+pillow in search of cool spots. Her mother puffed out slowly into the
+silence, her father a bit more sonorous and full of rumblings.
+
+Lilly felt herself wound up tightly and needing to be run down. She was
+taut as a spring. After a while she took to plucking out from the
+darkness words of sedative quality.
+
+"Dove," she repeated softly to herself, and very, very slowly. "Dove.
+Beautiful, quiet dove. Saint. Cathedral. Peace. Dell."
+
+But when she finally did drop off to sleep a smile of protuberant teeth
+was out like a rainbow across her darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Latitudinally speaking, there are about two kinds of Americans--those
+who live west of Syracuse, and those who do not. An imaginary line
+separates the tropic of candescence, fast trains, naval reviews, broad
+a's, Broadway, Beacon Street, Independence Square, and Tammany Hall from
+the cancer of craps, silver dollars, lynchings, alfalfa, toothpicks,
+detachable cuffs, napkin rings, and boll weevils.
+
+It is more than probable that Horace Lindsley's and Lilly Becker's
+lineage were loamy with about the same magnesia of the soil. Generations
+of each of them had tilled into the more or less contiguous dirt of
+Teutonic Europe.
+
+Lilly's progenitors had bartered in low Dutch; Horace Lindsley's in high
+German, which, after all, is more a matter of geography than altitudes.
+
+An oval daguerreotype of a great-grandmother at the harpsichord had hung
+in Carrie Becker's (_nee_ Ploag) home in Granite City.
+
+A Lindsley had once presented an emperor with a hand-illuminated version
+of the King James Bible, wrought out of peasant patience. Horace
+Lindsley's mother belonged to a New England suffrage society when ladies
+still wore silk mitts, and had dared to open a private kindergarten in
+her back parlor after marriage.
+
+It was this tincture of culture running like a light bluing through
+Lindsley's heritage that began to set in motion the little sleeping
+molecules of Lilly's class consciousness.
+
+"Middle class," came to be a term employed always with lips that curled.
+There were, then, actually men creatures outside the English "Fireside
+Novels" she was allowed to devour without interruption by parents to
+whom books were largely objects with which a room was cluttered up, who
+wore spats, did play tennis in white flannels, turned down the page at a
+favorite passage of poetry, eschewed suspenders for belts, were
+guiltless of sleeve garters, and attended Saturday-afternoon symphony
+concerts, in Lindsley's case, almost a lone male, debonaire and
+unabashed in a garden of women.
+
+At Lilly's urgent instance she and her mother often attended these
+subscription concerts, seats for single performances obtainable (in a
+commendable zeal to promote local music) in exchange for a newspaper
+coupon and twenty-five cents.
+
+Mrs. Becker frankly yawned through them, nictitating, as it were, during
+the long narrative passages of the symphony or occupied with the
+personnel of the audience.
+
+"Look, Lilly," whispering behind her unopened program, "that's a pretty
+idea over there on that red-haired girl. See the way the baby ribbon is
+run through the sleeves. Do you want a dress like that?"
+
+"Sh-h-h-h, mamma! No; it's too fussy!"
+
+"Why don't they play something with a tune to it? I wouldn't give a row
+of pins for music without any air at all."
+
+"Sh-h-h-h, mamma. There isn't much tune to classical music."
+
+"I wish the first violinist would play a solo. 'Warum,' like last time.
+I've some baby ribbon just like that, Lilly. I picked it up on sale in
+Gentle's basement bins--"
+
+"Mamma, don't stare so."
+
+"Don't criticize everything I do."
+
+At one of these concerts Lilly shot out her hand suddenly, closing it
+over her mother's wrist.
+
+"Mamma, there's Lindsley. See, down there in the fourth row."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"My English teacher. See, polishing his eyeglasses."
+
+Mrs. Becker sat straight, chin out like an antenna.
+
+"Is that him?"
+
+"Yes, that's he."
+
+"I don't see anything so wonderful about him. He needs a haircut."
+
+"Oh, mamma, you think all men have to wear their hair short and ugly
+like papa and Uncle Buck. In the East men look like that."
+
+"The idea! A man calls himself a man coming to a matinee like this. Your
+papa ought to know that you have a sissy like him on your mind. Such a
+looking thing! Ugh!"
+
+These recurring intimations could sting Lilly almost to tears.
+
+"Oh, mamma, that's just the--the meanest thing to say. Can't I show you
+my English teacher without having him on my mind?"
+
+"I never could stand a man whose teeth stick out. He looks like a
+horse."
+
+"Papa's teeth stick out."
+
+"Yes, but just one, and his mustache hides that. I only hope for you,
+Lilly, that some day you get a man as good as your father."
+
+"How did papa propose to you, mamma? What did he say?"
+
+Even Mrs. Becker could flush, quite prettily, too, her lids dropping at
+this not infrequent query of Lilly's.
+
+"It's not nice for young girls to ask such questions."
+
+"Go on, mamma, what did he say?"
+
+"I don't remember."
+
+The overture broke in upon them then, a brilliantly noisy one from
+Tschaikowsky that bathed them in a vichy of excited surf.
+
+Settling with her head snuggled against her fur tippet, the back of her
+neck against the chair top, Lilly could feel herself recede, as it were,
+into a sort of anagogical half consciousness, laved and carried along on
+currents of melody that were as sensually delicious as a warm bath. Her
+awareness of Lindsley on a diagonal from her so that she could see his
+profile hook into the music-scented dimness, ran under her skin like a
+quick shimmer.
+
+The proscenium arch curved again into her consciousness, herself its
+center and vocal beyond the powers of the human organ.
+
+The slamming up of chairs and mussy shuffling into wraps recalled her.
+It was indescribably sad, this swimming up to reality. The buttoning of
+her little tippet. The smell of damp umbrellas. Then the jamming down
+the aisle toward the late and rainy afternoon. At the door they were
+suddenly crushed up against Horace Lindsley, his coat collar turned up
+about his ears.
+
+"Miss Becker," he said, by way of greeting, nodding and showing his
+teeth.
+
+Her heart became a little elevator dropping in sheer descent.
+
+"Oh--how--do--you--do?" They were pushed shoulder to shoulder, and, to
+Lilly's agony, her mother's voice lifted itself in loud concern.
+
+"For pity's sake, look at that downpour, will you? I hope your father
+has the good sense to wear his rubbers. Ouch! Don't knock me
+down, please."
+
+"Mamma--please. Mr. Lindsley, I want you to meet my mother."
+
+"Pleased to meet you. Lilly certainly has talked of her English teacher
+a lot."
+
+"She is a very interesting little student, Mrs. Becker. Quite a quality
+to her work."
+
+"Well, I am certainly pleased to hear that. She's our only one, you
+know."
+
+"Lilly has a tendency to let her imagination run away with her. A good
+fault if she controls it."
+
+"That's what her father and I always tell her. The child has too many
+talents to settle down to any one. She gets her music from my side of
+the house, but she quits practicing to write and she quits writing to
+practice. It's not that we want our little girl ever to make her own
+living, but her father and I believe in a girl being prepared, even if
+she never has to use it. That's why we are having her take the
+commercial course. We don't pretend to be swells, but at least we plan
+to do as well for our child as the next."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+LILLY (in her agony): "Come, mamma."
+
+"I wish you could read the poem she wrote last night, Mr. Lindsley. Not
+that I give a row of pins for poetry, as a rule, but I told her she
+ought to take this one to school."
+
+"Please, mamma, please!"
+
+"If I do say it myself, it was grand. Mr. Hazzard, quite an educated
+gentleman who boards where we do, thought so, too. Lilly, why don't you
+show Mr. Lindsley that poem? He's authority."
+
+"Mamma, if only you won't talk about it."
+
+"You must bring it to class, Miss Becker."
+
+"No, no! I've--I've torn it up."
+
+"I don't remember all of it, but everybody considered it a grand thought
+for such a young girl; it goes--"
+
+"Mamma! Mamma--not here--now!"
+
+     "I would not have the restless soul
+        That sees not beauty everywhere.
+     I see it glint on ocean waves,
+        Dance through a youth's or maiden's hair."
+
+"Mamma, they're pushing so! Good night, Mr. Lindsley. Mamma, come!"
+
+Outside in the wet dusk they boarded an electric car, Lilly and her
+mother crammed on a rear platform of the wet overcoats, leaking
+umbrellas, and wet-smelling mackintoshes of dinner-bound St. Louis.
+
+"He's a right nice young man, intelligent--but if ever a person looked
+like a horse! You see, he agrees with your papa and me. You don't apply
+yourself to any one thing."
+
+Lilly turned her inflamed, quivering face upon her mother, trying to
+speak through a violent aching of tonsils.
+
+"Oh," she cried, "how could you? I'll never look him in the face again!
+Oh--oh--how could you?"
+
+"Are you crazy? How could I what?"
+
+"The poem. The--the glint in--his hair. He'll think it was his hair I
+meant. Oh! Oh!"
+
+The ready ire which could flame up in Mrs. Becker leaped out then.
+
+"If you are ashamed of your mother, maybe you had better not be seen
+out with her again. All I am good for is to stint and manage to get you
+pretty clothes."
+
+"No, n-no, mamma, I didn't mean that, dear."
+
+"For a horse-face like him I won't be made little."
+
+"Sh-h-h-h, dear! The whole street car doesn't need to hear."
+
+"I wouldn't give a row of pins for ten like him."
+
+"Mamma, the way you--talked."
+
+"The way I talked, what? I suppose hereafter when I go out with my
+educated daughter I will have to wear a muzzle."
+
+"I--Oh, it wasn't what you said, mamma; it was--the way you said it."
+
+"The way I said it? That's a rich one. If I don't tell your father! My
+own child is ashamed of her mother. Well, let me tell you I--"
+
+"No, mamma, you don't understand. Take that word 'swells,' for instance.
+Oh, I know I've used it myself, but all of a sudden, to-day, it--it
+sounded so ordinary."
+
+"For a hundred-dollar-a-month school-teacher that your papa has to pay
+taxes to support, I'm not afraid of my p's and q's."
+
+"And, mamma," suddenly and acutely sensitive to pleonasm, "you begin
+every sentence with 'say' and you say 'certainly' so often."
+
+"If I don't have a talk with your father when he comes home this night!
+That's the thanks I get for sitting through a concert with you when I
+might have been enjoying myself at my euchre club. Just get those
+high-tone notions out of your head. We're simple people, not swells.
+You're a changed child these days."
+
+It was true. An ineffable ache, a darting neuralgia of spirit, too
+cunning and quick for diagnosis, was shooting through Lilly her last two
+years at High School.
+
+That Horace Lindsley, who was hardly to indent her life and whose
+interest in the clean-eyed girl was little more than a leaf upon his
+consciousness, and whose feet were already feeling the tug of the
+quicksands of mediocrity which were to suck him out of her reckoning,
+should have been the innocent source of this neurosis, is hardly
+remarkable.
+
+Lilly, with the mysterious tenacity of a crannied flower, was pulling
+from her soil toward the light. And light in all its chiaroscuras rules
+the _se leve, couche_, complexion, and humors of the world. Lindsley
+was a ray.
+
+And so her adolescence came in suddenly, almost stormlike, uprooting
+little forests of sapling traditions.
+
+At sixteen she still slept on the cot drawn across the bed end and rode
+her bicycle up and down the sidewalks, holding her skirts down against
+the wind, but also she had ransacked the boarding-house shelves and High
+School library, reading her uncensored way through _Lady Audrey's
+Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain
+Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To
+Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old
+Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice,
+Vanity Fair, Les Miserables, Stories of the Operas_, and a red volume
+rescued from propping up the hall hatrack, _Great Lovers_.
+
+Within that same year Katy Stutz twice lowered her skirt hems.
+
+"Mamma, I think it is terrible I haven't a room to myself."
+
+The entire surface of Mrs. Becker seemed to coat over with sensitiveness
+to this frequently discussed issue.
+
+"Why," her lips writhing with an excoriating brand of self-pity, "who am
+I that I should want a home for my daughter, now that she is grown? Mr.
+Kemble can treat his wife like a queen, but me--why, I'm mud under my
+husband's feet."
+
+The Kemble family, on a wave of putative prosperity, had eight months
+since gone to housekeeping in a rather pretentious rock-fronted house on
+one of the many newly graded streets west of Kingshighway. Every Friday
+night Lilly slept with Flora, the two side by side in Flora's pretty new
+bird's-eye-maple bed, exchanging unextinguishable confidences well
+through nights wakeful with their dreams.
+
+"Flora has her own parlor to practice in, and here I can't even sing a
+little without the entire boarding house rapping on the wall."
+
+"It's a shame. Watch me talk to your father to-night."
+
+"Mamma, can't I please take elocution?"
+
+"I should say not. Aren't piano and voice sufficient? The idea! I
+wouldn't give a row of pins for all the elocution in the world. Reciting
+is out of date."
+
+"Mamma, it isn't. Mr. Lindsley says the modern woman of culture should
+cultivate her speaking voice the same as she learns to use her singing
+voice. Please, mamma; only a dollar a lesson."
+
+"Oh, I don't care! Goodness knows where the money is coming from, with
+flax twine where it is; but anything for peace."
+
+And so when Lilly graduated from High School,  third in her class, and
+again slightly to the rear of Estelle Foote, who read the valedictory,
+she was executing excitedly, if sloppily, "The Turkish Patrol," was
+singing in an abominably trained but elastic enough soprano, the "Jewel
+Song" from "Faust," and "Jocelyn," a lullaby, and at a private recital
+of the Alden School of Dramatic Expression had recited "A Set of
+Turquoise" to incidental music.
+
+Mrs. Schum's boarding house, to the man, turned out to Lilly's High
+School graduation, Katy Stutz and Willie standing in the wings and all
+unwittingly visible from the house. A German-silver manicure set,
+handsomely embossed, bore the somewhat cryptic card, "To Lilly Becker,
+as she stands on the threshold of life, from her friends in the house."
+There were a Honiton-lace fan with mother-of-pearl sticks, with the best
+wishes of her mother's euchre club, and from her parents a tiny diamond
+ring set high in gold facets, "To Lilly, from her parents, June, 1901,"
+engraved in the hoop.
+
+That night, still in her white organdie frock, with its whirligig design
+of too much Valenciennes lace, her hair worn high and revealing an
+unsuspectedly white nape of neck, Lilly regarded her parents across a
+little table-display of gifts.
+
+"I feel so queer," she said, looking off through the chocolate-ochre
+wall paper, the reaction already set in. "So sort of--finished.
+Nothing to do."
+
+MR. BECKER: "That was certainly a fine speech the president of the Board
+of Education made. You've something now that no one can take away from
+you. Knowledge is power."
+
+"Two girls in our class are going to the University of Missouri, papa.
+That's what I'd like to do--go to college."
+
+"Don't spoil a good thing by trying to overdo it, Lilly. It is as bad
+for a young girl to permit herself to be educated into one of those
+bold, unwomanly woman's-rights girls as it is for her to be frivolous
+and empty-headed. When women get too smart they get unattractive."
+
+"But, papa, girls are beginning more and more to go to college, and all
+women will be--suffrage--some day."
+
+"Not womanly girls, Lilly."
+
+"I always said that High School would be her ruination."
+
+"I didn't learn it there, mamma. I always wanted to be something--"
+
+"Well, you're a finished stenographer, aren't you? Why not go down to
+your father's office a couple of mornings a week?"
+
+"I don't mean stenography. I hated learning it. I mean
+something--something--beyond--"
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Becker, quiet at the business of wrapping away some of the
+gifts, glanced up, two round spots of color on her cheeks.
+
+"You _are_ going to do something, Lilly. Have a home and entertain in it
+like other girls."
+
+"But--"
+
+"I've a piece of news for you and your father. If I waited for him to
+take the initiative I'd wait until the crack of doom."
+
+"What is it, little woman?"
+
+"I signed a lease yesterday for one of those yellow-brick houses--seven
+rooms, bath, furnace heat, and privilege of buying. Twenty-eight
+dollars, out on Page Avenue near Union. We move in two weeks
+from to-day."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+There followed one of those years which come and go even in the small
+affairs of small men, when for Ben Becker swift waters flowed under the
+bridge. He was just that, a small man, prided himself upon it and was
+frequent in his boast: "I'm a small man, Carrie. I don't hope to make a
+big or showy success of it. Just a comfortable and unassuming living is
+about all I expect to get out of it, and that's a pretty good deal."
+
+The Spanish-American War, something of musical comedy in its setting,
+had run its brief malarial engagement, netting Ben Becker, in one order
+of hemp rope alone, a cleanly realized profit of forty-two
+hundred dollars.
+
+On a new and gradually attained bank credit the B. T. Becker Hemp, Rope,
+and Twine Company bought out the about-to-be-insolvent Mound City Flax
+Twine Company, the consolidated interests moving into a two-story brick
+building on South Seventh Street.
+
+The firm took on the subtle and psychological proportions that go with
+incorporation, however unassuming, capitalizing at fifteen thousand
+dollars, B. T. Becker, president; Jerry Hensel, trusted foreman of
+years, vice president and holder of ten shares; Carrie Becker, secretary
+and treasurer and, to propitiate the law, holder of one share.
+
+The little house on Page Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding
+the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none
+the less---and with the flexible personality of houses--taking on the
+print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale
+through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's euchre friends,
+arriving from Grand Rapids two months late, completed a careful and
+thrifty period of housefurnishing. There were an upright piano, still
+rented, but, like the house, payments to apply to a possible future
+purchase, in the square of "reception hall"; a double brass bedstead in
+the second-story front; and tucked away in the back of the tiny house,
+overlooking, through sheerest of dimity curtains, a rolling ocean of
+empty lots, the German-silver manicure set spread out on the dressing
+table, Lilly's bird's-eye-maple bedroom come true.
+
+Followed even then a long and uneasy period of adjustment. The up and
+down stairs tugged at the rear muscles of Mrs. Becker's legs, compelling
+evening foot baths. Mr. Becker chafed under the twenty minutes
+additional street-car ride, eating his dinner by gaslight even in
+August. The bed making and her allotment of the upstairs work irked
+Lilly, even though Willie's stepniece, Georgia, came to help out once a
+week, and evenings the little house could seem very still and
+untenanted.
+
+But after the arrival of the mahogany-and-velours parlor set, the music
+cabinet, and the hanging of crispy lace curtains, Lilly standing on the
+ladder, her mother steadying from below, and finally the laying of a
+well-padded strip of stair carpet to eat in the hollow noises of new
+tenancy, the house began to settle, so to speak.
+
+Something latent, something congenital, even malignant, however, had
+developed in Mrs. Becker. She took a fierce kind of joy, not untinged
+with the mongrel emotion of self-pity, in scrubbing, on hands and knees,
+the entire flight of back stairs at the black six-o'clock hour of wintry
+mornings, her voice tickling up like a feather duster to Lilly's
+reluctantly awakening senses.
+
+"Lil-ly! Get up! I've done a day's work already. If I was a girl I
+wouldn't want to sleep while my mother slaves."
+
+But let Lilly so much as venture down into the wintry gaslight of the
+bacon-fragrant kitchen, proffering her drowsy aid, a new flow, still in
+the key of termagency, would greet her.
+
+"Go right back to bed, Lilly. You want to catch your death of cold?"
+
+"But, mamma, you fuss so. I'd rather help than listen. Here, let me stir
+the oatmeal."
+
+"Go back to bed, I say. I don't intend to have you spoil your hands with
+kitchen work. Maybe some day your father will feel in a position to give
+his wife a permanent servant girl like any other woman has."
+
+"Mamma, he's always begging you to get one,"
+
+"I know. Talk is cheap. Did you hear what I said, Lilly? Stop that
+stirring and go back to bed! I'll bring up your breakfast after a while.
+I'll fix your sandwiches for the sewing circle this afternoon."
+
+"Oh, mamma, I just hate that circle! I wish to goodness you would let me
+resign."
+
+"I have a grateful daughter, I have. Any other child with your
+advantages would think she had heaven on earth."
+
+"I hate it, I tell you. Flora and Snow and all those girls, with nothing
+on their brains except fellows and fancy work, make me positively sick."
+
+"I notice Flora had enough brains to become engaged to a fine young
+fellow with prospects like Vincent Bankhead."
+
+"Every time I sit down at that circle I think I'm going to scream. I
+just can't rake up enthusiasm over French knots. Something in me begins
+to suffocate and I can't get out from under. I hate it."
+
+Regarding her daughter through the bluish aroma of bacon in the frying,
+her early-morning coiffure and wrapper not lenient with her, a
+bitterness pulled at the lips of Mrs. Becker.
+
+"That settles it. I'm going to have a talk with your father this
+morning."
+
+"Oh, mamma, please don't begin a scene!"
+
+"Ben, are you ready for breakfast? Come down. What do you do up there so
+long? You've been one solid hour splashing around the bathroom, as if I
+didn't have to get down on my hands and knees to wipe up the flood
+around the bathtub. Hurry! Your daughter has something to say to you."
+
+"Coming, Carrie. Don't get excited."
+
+"Don't get excited! I think your father would ram that down my throat if
+this house was tumbling around our heads."
+
+It was true that Mr. Becker's imperturbability incased him like a kindly
+coating of tallow. His daily and peremptory call to breakfast brought
+him down only after the last satisfactory application of whisk, tooth,
+hand, shoe, bath, and hair brush, his invariable white-linen string tie
+adjusted to a nicety, his neat gray business suit buttoned over a
+gradual embonpoint.
+
+"If I took as good care of myself as my husband does, I'd live to be a
+thousand."
+
+"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed to-day."
+
+On this particular morning he descended genial, rubbing cold,
+soap-exuding hands together.
+
+"Well, little woman! Good morning, daughter."
+
+"Ben, I'm at my row's end with Lilly. Something has got to be done or I
+can't stand it."
+
+He sat down, an immediate tiredness out in his face, adjusting his
+napkin by the patent fasteners to each coat lapel.
+
+"Now, Carrie, have you and Lilly been quarreling again? Doesn't it seem
+too bad, Lilly, that you and your mother cannot get on without these
+disturbances? Your mother may have her peculiarities, but she
+means well."
+
+A ready wave of red self-commiseration dashed itself across Mrs.
+Becker's face.
+
+"I can't stand it, Ben. I don't know what she wants. Maybe you can
+please her. I can't. Everything I do is wrong. Everything."
+
+In her little blue-gingham morning dress, out of which her neck flowered
+white and ever beautiful of nape, Lilly crumbled up her biscuit, eyes
+miserably down, the red-hot pricklings which invariably accompanied
+these scenes flashing over her and a crowding in her throat as if she
+must tear it open for language to make them understand.
+
+"Talk to your father, now! Tell him some of the things you hound me
+with."
+
+"Lilly, what seems to be the trouble?"
+
+"I--I don't know. Mamma gets so excited right away. I just happened to
+mention that--I don't know what to do with myself."
+
+"Do with yourself! Help me in the house. I can give you enough to do
+with yourself. I don't get lonesome."
+
+"Carrie, now, don't holler."
+
+"That's the way she is, papa. She gets excited and hollers at me
+because I can't get interested in sewing clubs and housework."
+
+"It's because you've got it too good that you're not satisfied. That
+Flora Kemble, that never has a decent thing to wear, gets engaged
+to a--"
+
+"Now, Carrie, that's no way to talk."
+
+"Mamma always makes me feel uncomfortable because I'm not married yet."
+
+"Now do you believe what I go through with, Ben?"
+
+"You haven't any faith in me, but--somewhere--destiny, or whatever you
+want to call it, has a job waiting for me!"
+
+"That's too poetical for me to keep up with. Thank goodness I'm a plain
+woman who knows her place in life."
+
+"Exactly, mamma. It isn't that I consider myself above Flora's party
+to-morrow night. It's not my place. I don't belong there. I hate it, I
+tell you."
+
+"You hear that, Ben? That's the thanks I get. You know the way I've
+tried to make this little home one a child could be proud of. Take the
+time that fine young Bryant fellow came to call. Why, that little parlor
+of ours was fit for a princess. His knuckles didn't suit her! They
+cracked, she said. I've heard of lots of excuses for not taking to boys,
+but that beats all. Three girls out of the sewing club already married
+and Flora engaged to that well-to-do Bankhead boy, and mine holds
+herself above them all."
+
+"Your mother isn't all wrong, Lilly."
+
+"I've run my legs off for the white organdie so Katy Stutz could make it
+up for Flora's engagement party to-morrow night. Does she appreciate it?
+Oh yes, long face is the kind of appreciation I get."
+
+"I'd rather stay home, mamma, and practice my singing or
+read--anything--"
+
+"You'll sing _there_. Mrs. Kemble has it all fixed for Flora to call on
+you just before the refreshments. If you begin to pout about this party,
+Lilly, I--"
+
+"Oh," cried Lilly, turning her face away to hide the embitterment of lip
+and still crumbling up her biscuit, "don't worry. I'm going if--if it
+kills me."
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Becker's face quivered ominously, the impending
+storm-cloud bursting.
+
+"I wish I was dead. What do I get out of it? Struggle and sacrifice, and
+all for an ungrateful daughter that isn't happy in her home."
+
+"It isn't that. Just let me be--myself!"
+
+"Then what is yourself? For God's sake tell us what? Anything to end
+this state of affairs."
+
+"I'm suffocating here. Let me make something out of myself."
+
+"Listen to her, Ben. Make something. Her stories come back from the
+editors. Her teacher keeps telling me her voice isn't ready yet. Miss
+Lee says her piano technique is lazy--"
+
+"Then let me travel--college--anything."
+
+"She thinks we're millionaires, Ben."
+
+"Lilly, Lilly! What is the young generation coming to?"
+
+"I wish I was dead. Dead," cried Mrs. Becker, beating at the table until
+the dishes shivered. Danger lights sprang out in little green signals
+around about the flanges of her nose. She was mounting to hysteria.
+
+"Lilly, aren't you ashamed to torture your mother like this?" cried Mr.
+Becker, his voice shot through with what for him amounted to a pistol
+report. "Comfort your mother. Apologize at once!"
+
+"Mamma, I'm sorry! I am, dear."
+
+"You would think we were plotting against her."
+
+"Now, now, Carrie, Lilly doesn't mean all she says."
+
+"But she eats my life out."
+
+"She wants to please us. Don't you, Lilly?"
+
+"Y-yes, papa--"
+
+"Now let us see if things can't run smoother in our little home, eh,
+Lilly? We'll all try and do each his part, eh, Lilly?"
+
+"Y-yes, papa."
+
+"It's late," cried Mrs. Becker, suddenly, on the single gong of half
+after seven, and, ever quick and kaleidoscopic of mood: "Katy Stutz will
+be here any minute. That's her now. Run upstairs, Lilly, and take the
+top off the sewing machine and lay out the white organdie. Quick, Lilly.
+I want you to have it without fail for to-morrow night."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+It was at this controversial gathering of young people at the home of
+Flora Kemble that Lilly met, for the first time, Albert Penny.
+
+The Kemble home lent itself gracefully to occasions of this kind, the
+parlor and reception hall opening into one, and the impending
+refreshments in the dining room shut off with folding doors. There was
+more of ostentation in the Kemble home. More festooning of fringed
+scarfs, gilt chairs, and a glass curio cabinet crammed with knickknacks.
+
+"Dutch as sauerkraut," was Mrs. Becker's indictment; and Flora Kemble
+came under the gaucherie of the impeachment, too.
+
+She had attained tall and exceedingly supine proportions, wore pinks and
+blues and an invariable necklace of pink paste pearls to fine advantage,
+and a fuzz of yellow bangs that fell down over her eyes, only to be
+repeatedly flung back again.
+
+Again MRS. BECKER (who could be caustic): "She makes me so nervous, with
+her hair down over her eyes like a poodle dog, that I could scream."
+
+Nevertheless, at eighteen Flora's neat spiritous air lay calm as a
+wimple over her keenly motivated little self. The same apparently
+guileless exterior that had concealed her struggle along a road lit with
+midnight oil toward her graduation, enveloped the campaign of strategy
+and minutiae that had resulted victoriously in her engagement to Vincent
+Bankhead, assistant credit man to his father.
+
+Albert Penny at this time was second-assistant buyer for Slocum-Hines,
+and, at the instance of his friend Vincent, somewhat reluctantly
+present.
+
+"Al, what are you doing to-night?"
+
+"Oh, about the same old thing! Take a stroll and turn in, I guess. Why?"
+
+"There is a little gathering up at the Kembles' this evening. Thought
+maybe you'd like to meet the girl. Nothing formal, just a few of the
+girls and boys over to celebrate."
+
+"I'm not much on that kind of thing, Bankhead. Guess you'd better count
+me out."
+
+"Come along. Want to show you the kind of little peach I've picked."
+
+"Ask me out some night to a quiet little supper, Bankhead. I feel a cold
+coming on."
+
+"Quiet little supper, nothing. That's your trouble now, too much quiet.
+Nice people, her folks. It'll do you good."
+
+And so it came that when the folding doors between the Kemble dining
+room and parlor were thrown open, Lilly Becker, still flushed from a
+self-accompanied rendition of "Angels' Serenade" and an encore,
+"Jocelyn," and Albert Penny, in a neat business suit and plaid
+four-in-hand, found themselves side by side, napkin and dish of ice
+cream on each of their laps, gay little bubbles of conversation, that
+were constantly exploding into laughter, floating up from off the
+gathering.
+
+There is a photograph somewhere in an album of Lilly much as she must
+have looked that night. Her white organdie frock out charmingly around
+her, a fluted ruffle at the low neck forming fitting calyx for the fine
+upward flow of her high white chest into firm, smooth throat; the
+enormous puff sleeves of the period ending above the elbow where her
+arm was roundest; the ardent, rather upward thrust of face as if the
+stars were fragrant; the little lilt to the eyebrows; the straight gray
+eyes; the complexion smooth as double cream, flowing in cleanest
+jointure into the shining brown hair, worn in an age of Psyche or
+Pompadour, so swiftly and shiningly drawn back that it might have been
+painted there.
+
+That was the Lilly Becker upon whom Albert Penny cast the first second
+glance he had ever spared her sex.
+
+"Miss Becker, we certainly did enjoy your solo."
+
+She was still warmed from the effort, the tingling nervousness of the
+moment not yet died down, and she was eager and grateful.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Penny, did you really? I was so afraid I flatted there at the
+end."
+
+"I had to laugh the way they broke in with clapping before you were
+finished. I knew you weren't done."
+
+"Oh, then you're musical, too?"
+
+"No, but I could see there was one more page you hadn't turned."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"My! but you can go high! Like a regular opera singer."
+
+"Oh, if I thought you meant that! It's my ambition to sing--real big
+opera, you know."
+
+"It certainly was a pretty song, not so much the song as the way you
+sang it. I could understand every word."
+
+"If only my parents could hear you say that. You see, they don't
+approve. They think it's all right for a girl to have a parlor voice,
+but it must stop right there, otherwise it becomes a liability instead
+of an asset."
+
+At this little conceit of speech he turned delighted eyes upon her.
+
+"Why, you're a regular little business woman!" he cried.
+
+"Yes," she sighed out at him through a smile, "I took the commercial
+course at High."
+
+Inhibitions induce callosities, and Albert Penny's inhibitions, incased
+within the shell of himself, were as catalogic as Homer's list of ships.
+First, like Tithonus, he had no youth. Persiflage, which he secretly
+envied in others, on his own lips went off like damp fireworks. He loved
+order and his mind easily took in statistics. He had invented a wire
+kind of dish for utilizing the left-over blobs of soap. He never
+received so much as a street-car transfer without reading its entire
+face contents. In seven years he had not availed himself of the annual
+two weeks' vacation offered him by his firm, and, conspire as he would
+against it, Sunday continued to represent to him a hebdomadal vacuity of
+morning paper, afternoon nap and walk, unsatisfactory cold supper, and
+early to bed. His very capacity for monotony seemed to engender it. He
+could sit in Forest Park the whole of a Sunday afternoon, poring over a
+chance railroad time-table picked up on the bench; paring his straight,
+clean finger nails with a penknife; observing the carriages go by; or
+sit beside the lake, watching the skiffs glide about at twenty-five
+cents the hour; and finally, hat brim down over his eyes, doze until
+twilight seeped damply into his consciousness.
+
+This same unsensitiveness to routine had enhanced his value with
+Slocum-Hines from delivery boy at fifteen to second-assistant buyer at
+twenty-five, an amenability, however, that threatened to pauperize him
+of any capacity for play. Under the well-meant banterings of friends he
+became conscious of it, but to cast it off was to cast off the thing he
+was. He tried to learn to recreate, and took Saturday-evening street-car
+rides to Forest Park Highlands and joined a bowling club. He paid ten
+dollars in advance for a course of six dancing lessons, too, and only
+took four of them.
+
+There had never been a woman, a perfume, or a regret in his life. In the
+period of ten years since his migration from the paternal farm ten miles
+outside of Sparta, Missouri, he had worked for one firm, boarded with
+one landlady, and eaten about three thousand quick lunches in the Old
+Rock Bakery at Lucas Avenue and Broadway. To further account for the
+state of existing hiatus in Mr. Penny's scheme of things would be
+tautology.
+
+A short femur line gave him an entirely false appearance of stockiness.
+On the contrary, he stood a full five feet ten, was thewed with fine
+compactness and solid with clean living and clean with solid living.
+Even the fiber of his remarkably fine hair was strong. It was the
+brilliant honey color of full-moon shine, lay off his brow, but not
+down, lending him a look of distinction to which he was hardly entitled.
+
+He regarded Lilly with a furtiveness prompted solely by a desire not to
+appear audacious. Her softly rising throat just recovering its normal
+beat reminded him of the sweet agitation of pigeons in the park. He was
+close enough to be conscious of an amazing impulse on his part to reach
+over and touch the soft white flesh above the cove of her elbow. A
+little blue thread of a vein showed there, maddeningly. A sense of inner
+pounding suffocated him. He felt as if he had suddenly stepped into a
+bath of charged waters, little explosions all over the surface of him.
+Then a numbness so that, when he placed his tongue to the roof of his
+mouth, it was insensate, and, somewhat frightened, he pinched the back
+of his hand, relieved by the stab of pain.
+
+"Do you dance, Mr. Penny?"
+
+"Me? I--No, I guess I'm what you would call temperance when it comes to
+frolics."
+
+A little clearing had been made in the parlor, a music box pricking out
+the "Blue Danube." From the dining room they sat regarding the three or
+four couples, Lilly marking time with the toe of her white-kid slipper.
+The elixir of the dance could rush to her head like wine, but she was
+not sought after as a partner, due to her reserve against a too locked
+embrace and a curious tendency to lead.
+
+"To me, dancing is poetry as written by the feet."
+
+He relieved her of her napkin and ice-cream dish, eager for suitable
+reply to this syrupy observation.
+
+"Speaking of feet, have you seen the show at Forest Park Highlands this
+week?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, really remarkable. There is an armless fellow there who eats and
+juggles, even writes, with his toes."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Sometime if you would honor me by--by accompanying--I--er--Becker, did
+I understand the name to be? I wonder if by any chance you are related
+to Ben Becker."
+
+She turned upon him with the immemorial sense of a point about to be
+scored, her eyes full of relish.
+
+"Why, I think I'm slightly related, Mr. Penny. He happens to be my
+father."
+
+He whacked his thigh.
+
+"You don't tell me! Why, I've bought rope and twine from your father for
+three years! A mighty fine gentleman, there. Well, well, this is a small
+world, after all."
+
+She noticed his large, protuberant Adam's apple throbbing with the
+accelerando of pleasure, and a thaw set in between them. He let his arm
+drape over the back of her chair, a stolen sense of her nearness
+dizzying him. He was like a man with a suddenly developed new sense,
+which he could not tickle enough.
+
+"Well, well!" he said. "Well, well, well!" And she sighed out again
+through her smile that he could fall so short of what he looked to be.
+
+"I used to say, when I was a little girl, Mr. Penny, that I wished my
+father were in a more romantic business than rope and twine. I wanted
+him to be a florist or a wood carver or a music publisher or some of the
+perfectly silly things that girls get into their heads."
+
+"I always say of myself that I must have been born with a wooden spoon
+in my mouth. Took to hardware from the very start. Left my stepfather's
+farm and general store at fifteen and made a bee line for the hardware
+business before I hardly knew what hardware meant. I suppose I'll die
+with my nose to one of those very grindstones we carry in stock and be
+buried with one of those same wooden spoons in my mouth. Although I
+always say, no burial for mine. Burn me up--cremate me when I'm
+finished here."
+
+"Papa is that way, too, about his business, I mean. Tied up in twine, I
+tell him."
+
+"Just ask your father if he knows Albert Penny, Miss Becker. Queer how
+things happen. This very day I turned over a memorandum to the head of
+my department, advising a certain buy in hemp rope, Becker and Co. in
+the back of my head all the time."
+
+At eleven o'clock the first guest rose to go, Lilly following immediate
+suit.
+
+His state of eagerness rose redly to his ears.
+
+"Will you permit me to escort you home, Miss Becker?"
+
+"Why, yes, if it won't upset Flora's plans for me. I only live two
+blocks over on Page."
+
+"I wish you lived as far as Carondalet," he said, choking over words too
+strange to be his.
+
+They walked home through quiet streets that smelled sweetly and moistly.
+
+He was scrupulously careful of her at crossings, his tingling fingers
+closing over the roundest part of her arm, the warmth of her shining
+through to the fabric of her eider-down-bordered cape, lending it a
+vibrant living quality that thrilled him.
+
+"I certainly have enjoyed a perfect evening, Miss Becker."
+
+The magic of youth stole out of the citified night upon her.
+
+"See!" she cried, her arm darting out of her cape, "that's Taurus up
+there. I can always tell him. He's green. See how he glitters to-night.
+Sometimes I feel sorry for Taurus. It's as if his little emerald soul is
+bursting to twinkle itself out of the monotony of all the white ones.
+That's what they were at the party to-night, all white. All of a color."
+
+"Except you."
+
+"Oh! Do you know the names of the stars, Mr. Penny?"
+
+"I know the Dipper. It's our trade-mark, you know. That's how I
+happened to work out our nest of aluminum dippers. Wonder if you
+wouldn't permit me to bring you out a set of those dippers, Miss Becker.
+All sizes fitted into one another. Just a little kitchen novelty you
+might enjoy."
+
+They were at her front steps now, the hall light flickering out over
+them.
+
+"I just certainly have enjoyed this evening, Miss Becker."
+
+"Nice of you to put it that way, Mr. Penny," she said, trying to appear
+unconscious of the unmistakable suns in his eyes.
+
+"I--I'm not much of a fellow for this kind of thing, but I see I've been
+making a mistake. A fellow like myself ought to get about more. But most
+of the--er--er--ladies--young ladies--I have met, if you will pardon my
+saying it, haven't been the sensible kind like yourself that a fellow
+could sit down and have a talk with."
+
+"I'm not very congenial, either, Mr. Penny, with the boys and girls I am
+thrown in with. Flora's all right, and Vincent, but I'd rather stay at
+home with my music or a good book than waste my time with social life. I
+just ache sometimes for something better."
+
+"Well, well," he said, "we certainly agree in a lot of ways. I thought I
+was the only home body."
+
+She was inside the door now, bare arm escaping the cape and out toward
+him.
+
+"Good night, Miss Becker. I--I hope I may be permitted to bring over
+those dippers some evening."
+
+"Why--er--yes, thank you."
+
+"Good night."
+
+Turning out the hall light, Lilly felt her way carefully upstairs to
+save creaks.
+
+"Lilly, that you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tear your dress?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Turn out the hall light?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tight? Wait. I'm getting up."
+
+"Never mind."
+
+But during the process of Lilly's undressing, huddled on the bed edge,
+arms hugging herself, Mrs. Becker held midnight commune.
+
+"Who was there?"
+
+"Oh, the usual crowd."
+
+"Refreshments?"
+
+"The usual."
+
+"Anybody admire your dress?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Don't tell me too much, Lilly. I might enjoy hearing it."
+
+"But, mamma, won't it keep until to-morrow? I'm sleepy now, dear."
+
+"Who brought you home--Roy?"
+
+"A Mr. Penny."
+
+"Who? I thought you said only the old crowd was there. It's like pulling
+teeth to get a word out of you."
+
+"A friend of Vincent's. Works at Slocum-Hines's."
+
+"Seems to me I've heard your father mention that name. Penny--familiar.
+Is he nice?"
+
+Lilly shuddered into a yawn. In the long drop of nightdress from
+shoulder to peeping toes, her hair cascading straight but full of
+electric fluff to her waist, she was as vibrant and as eupeptic as
+Diana, and as aloof from desire.
+
+"Yes, he's nice enough--"
+
+"Penny--certainly--familiar name."
+
+"--if you like him."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I say he's nice enough if you like his kind."
+
+"Well, Miss Fastidious, I wish I knew who your kind is."
+
+"I wish I did too, mamma."
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Becker leaned to the door, her voice lifted.
+
+"Ben!"
+
+"Oh, mamma, he's asleep!"
+
+"Oh, Ben!"
+
+"Mamma, how can you?"
+
+"Y-yes, Carrie."
+
+"Isn't that assistant buyer down at Slocum-Hines's, the one you say has
+thrown some orders in your way, named Penny?"
+
+"Mamma, surely that will keep until morning."
+
+"Isn't it, Ben?"
+
+"Yes, Carrie; but come back to bed."
+
+"I knew it! He's one of the coming young men at Slocum-Hines's. Vincent
+Bankhead swears by him. He throws some fine orders in your papa's way. I
+knew the name had a ring. Lilly, did he ask to--call?"
+
+"Mamma, I'm sleepy."
+
+"Did he?"
+
+"Yes--maybe--sometime."
+
+Then Mrs. Becker, full of small, eager ways, insisted upon tucking her
+daughter into bed, patting the light coverlet well up under her chin and
+opening the windows.
+
+"Good night, baby," she said, giving the covers a final pat. "Sleep
+tight and don't get up for breakfast. I want to bring it up to you."
+
+But, contrary to the blandishment, Lilly lay awake, open-eyed, for quite
+a round hour after her mother's voice, broken into occasionally by the
+patient but sleepy tones of her father, had died down.
+
+From her window she could see quite a patch of sky, finely powdered with
+stars, the Dipper pricked out boldly.
+
+For some reason, regarding it, a layer of tears formed on her eyes and
+dried over her hot stare.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+On the 6th of the following July, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny were
+married.
+
+The day dawned one of those imperturbable blues that hang over that
+latitude of the country like a hot wet blanket steaming down. The corn
+belt shriveled of thirst. The automobile had not yet bitten so deeply
+into the country roads, but even a light horse and buggy traveled in a
+whirligig of its own dust. St. Louis lay stark as if riveted there by
+the Cyclopean eye of the sun. For twenty-four hours the weather vanes of
+the great Middle West stood stock-still while July came in like a lion.
+The city slept in strange, improvised beds drawn up beside windows or
+made up on floors, and awoke enervated and damp at the back of the neck.
+
+Throughout the Becker household, however, the morning moved with a whir,
+the newly installed telephone lifting its shrill scream, delivery wagons
+at the door, the horses panting under wet sponges and awning hats,
+Georgia wide-eyed at the concurrence of events.
+
+For the half-dozenth time that morning Mrs. Becker suffered a little
+collapse, dropping down to the kitchen chair or hall bench, fanning
+herself with the end of her apron.
+
+"I'm dead! Another day like this will finish me. Georgia, have you
+polished the door bell? Those delivery boys finger it up so. I'm
+wringing wet with _prespiration_. If only there is a breeze in the
+church to-night. Georgia, if that is Mr. Albert on the telephone, tell
+him Miss Lilly isn't going to leave her room until noon. No, wait. I
+want to speak to him myself. Hello, Albert? Well, bridegroom, good
+morning!... What's left of me is fine.... I'm making her stay in her
+room. Poor child, she's all nerves. Don't be late. I hate last-minute
+weddings. Did you see the item in the morning _Globe_?... Yes, the name
+is spelled wrong, Pen-nie, but there's quite a few lines. 'In lieu of a
+honeymoon,' it goes on to say, 'the young couple will go to housekeeping
+at once in their new home, 5199 Page Avenue, directly across from the
+parents of the bride.' I'm sending over now to have all the windows
+opened so it won't be stuffy for you to-night. Wait until you see the
+presents, Albert, that came this morning. A check for five hundred
+dollars all the way from her uncle Buck in Alaska. That makes six
+hundred in checks. Three beautiful clocks, a dozen berry spoons from my
+euchre club, and an invitation in poetry for her to become a member of
+the Junior Matron Friday Club. If I wasn't so rushed I think I--I could
+just sit down and have a good cry. Albert, be careful of those silk
+sleeve garters I sent you for your wedding shirt, don't adjust them too
+tight; and you know how you catch cold. Don't perspire and go in a
+draught. And--and Albert, I see I have to remind you of little things
+the way I do Ben. You men with your heads so chock full of business!"
+(Very _sotto voce_.) "Send Lilly flowers this afternoon.
+Lilies-of-the-valley and white rosebuds. Remley's on your corner is a
+good place. Tell them your mother-in-law is a good customer and they'll
+give you a little discount.... Yes, she's upset, poor child. I was the
+same way. My mother almost had to shove me into the carriage. Well,
+Albert, call up again about noon. She'll be up by then. Good-by--son."
+
+A pox of perspiration was out over her face, sparkling forth again after
+each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department
+store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a
+miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions
+can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women
+into a tyranny of petty things.
+
+Then Mrs. Becker hurried upstairs, her white wrapper floating after.
+
+In the bathroom her husband leaned to a mirror, his jaw line thrust to
+the cleave of a razor.
+
+"I really envy you, Ben. Not even your daughter's wedding day can
+disturb you. For a cent I could cry my eyes out. It's only excitement
+keeps me going. I--could--c-c-cry."
+
+"Now, now, little woman."
+
+She sat down on a hall chair, regarding him through the open bathroom
+door.
+
+"Has she said anything to you, Ben, since yesterday? It's made me so
+upset."
+
+"Now, now, little woman, you must make allowances for a young girl's
+nervousness."
+
+"I know, Ben, but it worries me so. It's not natural for her to have
+crying spells like that one yesterday."
+
+"Nonsense! I'm not so sure you weren't a red-eyed bride."
+
+"My nervousness wasn't anything like hers. She'll make herself sick."
+
+"You mean you will."
+
+"Have you heard her moving about her room yet?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Shall I knock?"
+
+"No, Carrie; now let the child alone this morning."
+
+"I never knew her to stay in bed so long. It's after eleven, and the
+hair dresser coming at twelve. It will seem funny, won't it, Ben,
+her--little room empty to-night."
+
+"Now, now, no waterworks. What if she was moving away to another city
+instead of just settling down across the street? You worked this thing
+your way, and even now you don't feel satisfied."
+
+"I do feel satisfied, Ben, but I want her to be, too."
+
+"Now, little woman, mark my word, Lilly may feel that she is doing this
+thing in more or less of a spirit of sacrifice to our pleasure, but
+inside of a week she'll be as busy and happy a little housekeeper as
+her mother."
+
+"Is that her calling?"
+
+"Yes. Go to her, Carrie."
+
+Out in the little upper square of hallway Lilly appeared suddenly; her
+hair still down in the beautiful way she let it toss about her in sleep,
+and her body boldly outlined in a Japanese kimono she held tightly
+about her.
+
+"Mamma, will you and papa please come to my room? I want to talk to
+you."
+
+"Your father is shaving, Lilly. Can't you talk to us out here? How is
+our girl on her wedding day? Frightened? You're me all over again. Ask
+your father if I wasn't as pale as you are." She kissed her daughter on
+lips that were cold, brushing back the shower of hair from her
+shoulders. "You ought to see the presents, Lilly, that just--"
+
+"Mamma--papa--you must listen."
+
+"Yes, Lilly."
+
+"Please, won't you let me off? Please!"
+
+Her father regarded her from behind the white mud of lather, his eyes
+darkening up.
+
+"Now, now, sweetheart," he said, using one of his rarest words of
+endearment, "this won't do at all."
+
+"But I can't, papa. I just can't. I know it's terrible, this last
+minute, but--but--I tell you--I can't."
+
+"My God, Ben!"
+
+"Can't what, Lilly?"
+
+"Can't! I never had such a funny--a terrible feeling. I can't explain
+it, only let me off. Please! It's not too late. Lots of girls have done
+it--found out at the last minute they couldn't--"
+
+"My God! What are we to do, Ben? Ben!"
+
+"Carrie, if only you will hold your horses I'll handle this." He mopped
+off his face hurriedly, sliding into a dressing gown.
+
+"Come now, Lilly, into the front room. Sit down."
+
+She moved after him with the rather groping look of the blind.
+
+"Now what is this nonsense, Lilly, you've been hinting these last few
+days?"
+
+"I've made a mistake, papa. I should have said so weeks--ago--from the
+start. It isn't Albert's fault. It isn't anybody's fault. I've had it
+all along, this queer feeling all through the engagement and parties,
+but I kept hoping for your sakes I'd get over it--hoping--in vain--"
+
+"Why, of course, Lilly, you'll get over it! It's natural for a young
+girl to feel--"
+
+"No! No! My feeling won't lift! If only I had said nothing the night
+he--proposed. But mamma was waiting up. She--she pressed me so. It was
+so hard the way you put it. I know he's a fine fellow. I know, papa,
+he's thrown big orders in your way. But I can't help being what I am.
+Please, papa, let me off! Please!"
+
+An actual shrinkage of face seemed to have taken place in Mrs. Becker.
+
+"What'll we do? What'll we do, Ben?" she kept repeating, rocking herself
+back and forth in what seemed to border on dementia.
+
+"You see, papa, it's only to be a small wedding. We could so easily call
+things off. I'll take all the blame--"
+
+"No! No! No!"
+
+"Mamma dear, I'm as sorry--about it as you are, but--"
+
+"No! No! She's ruining our lives, Ben--disgracing--"
+
+"Lilly, are you sure that you are telling us everything?"
+
+"I swear it, papa. I know I'm inarticulate, I don't seem able to explain
+the terrible state I've been in for days--"
+
+"It's nervousness, Lilly."
+
+"I tell you, no! I can't make you understand. But I'm not cut out, papa,
+for what I'm going to settle down to. I'm something else than what you
+think I am. I guess I--I am a sort of botanical sport, papa, off our
+family tree. I know what you're going to say, and maybe you're right. I
+may have more ideas than I have talent, but let me go my way. Let me be
+what I am."
+
+"Lilly, Lilly, let us take this thing step by step, quietly. Surely,
+daughter, you appreciate the enormity of the situation!"
+
+"I do. I do."
+
+"Now to go back to the beginning. Did you consent to this engagement of
+your own free will?"
+
+"I did and I didn't."
+
+"You didn't?"
+
+"Oh, I know you let me decide for myself, but don't you think I felt the
+undercurrent of your attitudes? All the other girls settling down, as
+you put it. You and Albert such good friends, and then Albert himself
+so--so what he should be."
+
+"Now you are talking. If your mother and I hadn't felt that Albert was
+the fine and upright man for their little girl to marry, do you think
+they would have--"
+
+"I know! There we go around in the circle again. Everything is perfect.
+The little house, Albert's promotion to first assistant. Everything
+perfect, but me. I don't want it. I don't love him. You hear me! There
+is something in me he hasn't touched. Respect him? Yes, but respect is
+only a poor relation to love and comes in for the left-over and the
+cast-off emotions."
+
+"Her head is full of the novels she reads!"
+
+"You can't keep me from thinking like a woman. Feeling like one. Is it
+shameful to want to love? Is it wrong to desire in the man you are to
+marry that fundamental passion that makes the world go around? I'm not
+supposed to know any thing about the thing I'm plunging into until after
+I've plunged! I'm afraid, papa. Save me!"
+
+"Ben, I could swear who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers.
+I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her
+diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School
+the year before she graduated."
+
+"Mamma! Mamma!" fairly exploded to her feet by the potency of her sense
+of outrage. "Oh, you--you--"
+
+"I know I'm right."
+
+"Why, I haven't even seen him since I graduated! I've never talked ten
+words to the man in my life! Oh--oh--how can you?"
+
+"Just the same, he's been your ruination. Since you got him into your
+head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had
+him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more
+bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the
+Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't
+cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me
+tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish
+to God I'd never lived to see this day--"
+
+"Carrie!"
+
+"I do. Noon of my daughter's wedding day, and she can't make up her mind
+whether she'll be married or not. O God! it's funny--love, now at the
+last minute--oh--oh--" A geyser of hysteria shot up, raining down in a
+glassy kind of laugh. "Oh--oh, it's funny!--love--"
+
+"Carrie, you're hysterical. Here, smell this ammonia."
+
+"The little house--my heart's blood in it. A doll's house, ready for her
+to walk into. Membership in the Junior Matrons--trousseau--oh, it's
+funny--funny--"
+
+"For God's sake, papa, try to calm her!"
+
+"Funny--funny--funny."
+
+With a wave of sobs that broke over her, she went down, then, literally
+to her knees, her back heaving and shuddering.
+
+"Her wedding day--O God--funny--"
+
+"Mamma! Mamma! It's all right, dear. Don't--holler like that. I just got
+upset, that's all. Frightened like--like any other girl would. I'm all
+right now, mamma. I'm sorry."
+
+"We want to see you happy, baby. It's for your good."
+
+"Of course you do. I know it. I'm all right now, mamma."
+
+"We're your best friends, Lilly. We would go through fire for you."
+
+"Of course, mamma. I--I was nervous, that's all."
+
+"There's no finer boy breathes than Albert."
+
+"You're right."
+
+"He's sending you lilies-of-the-valley, baby. He's ordered himself some
+white-flannel tennis pants, too--the kind you admired. He got his report
+from the life-insurance people and he's a grand risk, Lilly. In as fine
+a condition to marry as a man could be. Baby, tell me--tell papa--aren't
+you happy?"
+
+"I am--I--oh, I am, dear! Why, here is Elsa ready to dress my hair!
+Mamma--dear--I'm all right now. Fine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eight o'clock that evening, in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church,
+little Evelyn Kemble, in the bushiest of white skirts and to the
+accompaniment of organ music rolling over her, placed a white-satin
+cushion before the smilax-banked altar.
+
+Kneeling on it, and to the antiphonal beat of the Reverend Stickney's
+voice, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny became as one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+By a strange conspiracy of middle-class morality, which clothes the
+white nude of life in suggestive factory-made garments, and by her own
+sheer sappiness, which vitalized her, but with the sexlessness of a
+young tree, Lilly, with all her rather puerile innocence left her,
+walked into her marriage like a blind Nydia, hands out and groping
+sensitively.
+
+The same, in a measure, was true of Albert, who came into his immaculate
+inheritance, himself immaculate, but with a nervous system well
+insulated by a great cautiousness of life.
+
+He was highly subject to head colds and occasional attacks of dyspepsia,
+due to his inability to abstain from certain foods. He was, therefore,
+sensitive to draughts and would not eat hot bread. He carried an
+umbrella absolutely upon all occasions and a celluloid toothpick in his
+waistcoat pocket.
+
+Then, too, he gargled. To chronicle the heroic emotions that motivate
+men is a fine task. Love and hate and all the chemistry of their
+mingling that go to form the plasma of human experience. It is a lesser,
+even an ignominious one to narrate Lilly's kind of anguish during this
+matinal performance of her husband. She suffered a tight-throated sort
+of anguish that could have been no keener had it been of larger
+provocation. Her toes and her fingers would curl and a quick ripple of
+flesh rush over her.
+
+Mornings, when he departed, his kiss, which smelled of mouth wash, would
+remain coldly against her lips with the peculiar burn of camphor ice.
+All her sensibilities seemed suddenly to fester.
+
+On a week day of the third week of her marriage, in her little canary
+cage of a yellow bedroom dominated with the monstrous brass bedstead of
+the period and a swell-front dresser elaborate in Honiton and flat
+silver, she endured, with her head crushed into the chair back, those
+noisome ablutions from across the hallway. She was wearing, these first
+mornings, a rose-colored negligee, foamy with lace and still violet
+scented from the trousseau chest, and especially designed to pink this
+early hour.
+
+It lay light to a skin that, strangely enough, did not covet its sensual
+touch. She craved back to the starchy blue-gingham morning dresses. It
+was as if she sat among the ruins of those crispy potential yesterdays,
+all her to-morrows ruthlessly and terribly solved.
+
+Something swift and eager had died within her. She was herself gone
+flabby. A wife, with a sudden and, to her, horrid new consciousness that
+had twisted every ligament of life.
+
+Her husband's collar so intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt,
+awaiting studs, spread out on the bed--their bed. His suspenders
+straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking
+back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he
+had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers)
+when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from the T bone. After
+the first week, he liked the bone, too, gnawing it, not mussily, but
+with his broad white teeth predatory and his temples working. She was a
+veritable bundle of these petty accumulated concepts, harrowed to
+their quick.
+
+She knew that presently he would enter the room in his trousers and
+undershirt, which he did upon the very minute, the little purple circle,
+like a stamp mark on the rind of a bacon, showing just beneath his
+Adam's apple, the shag of his yellow hair wetly curly from dousing, like
+a spaniel's.
+
+"Certainly fine water pressure we have in the bathroom, Lilly. I am
+going to bring home some tubing from the store and attach a spray."
+
+She looked out of the window over the languid little patch of front
+lawn, more gray than green from the scourge of heat. Insect life hung
+midair like a curtain of buzzings. Directly opposite the dusty, unmade
+street, she could see her parents' home standing unprotected except for
+one sapling maple, the sun already pressing against the drawn shades.
+There was a slight breeze through this morning that turned the sapling
+leaves and even lifted the little twist of tendril at the nape of
+Lilly's neck.
+
+It was just that spot, while tugging at his collar, that Albert Penny
+stooped to kiss.
+
+"Little wife," he said.
+
+"Ugh!" she felt.
+
+"Poor little wife, it was ninety-four and a half at six-thirty-eight
+this morning."
+
+His capacity for accuracy could madden her.
+
+He computed life in the minutiae of fractions, reckoning in terms of the
+halfpenny, the half minute, the half degree.
+
+She sat now, laying pleats in the pink negligee where it flowed over her
+knees, a half smile forced out on her lips.
+
+"Well, Albert," she said, wanting to keep her voice lifted, "I guess
+we're in it, aren't we? Up to our necks."
+
+"In what?"
+
+"Marriage."
+
+Leaning to the mirror for the adjustment of his collar button, he
+paused, regarding her reflection.
+
+"Well now, what an idea! Of course we're in it, and the wonder to me is
+how we ever stayed out so long."
+
+She reached up to yawn, her long white arms stretched above her head.
+
+"Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!" she said in what might have been the key of
+anything.
+
+"Poor little girl!" he said. "I wish I could make it cooler for you."
+
+"It isn't that."
+
+"What then is bothering your little head?"
+
+"I--oh, I don't know. I guess it's just the reaction after the
+excitement of the wedding."
+
+He came back to kiss the same tendril at the nape of her neck.
+
+"I'm glad it's over, too. Feels mighty good to settle down."
+
+"'Settle down.' Somehow I hate that expression."
+
+"All right, then, Mrs. Penny, we'll settle up. Speaking of settling up,
+I guess the missus wants her Monday-morning allowance, doesn't she?"
+
+"I--guess--so."
+
+He placed three already counted out five-dollar bills on the dresser,
+weighting them down with a silver-back mirror.
+
+"See if you can't make it last this week, Lilly. You watch Mother Becker
+market and you'll come out all right."
+
+"Oh, I can't pick around raw meat the way mamma does. It makes me sick."
+
+"Housekeeping may seem a little strange at first, but I'm not afraid my
+little wife is going to let any of them get ahead of her."
+
+"Whoever wants it, can have that honor."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"What's the program for to-day, Lilly?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know."
+
+"I'm going to send Joe out from the store to-day with some washers for
+the kitchen faucets and some poultry netting for a chicken yard. I'll
+potter around this evening and build one behind the woodshed. Chickens
+give a place a right homey touch."
+
+"And send out a man from Knatt's to fix the piano. They delivered it
+with a middle C that sticks."
+
+"Yes, and I'll send a can of Killbug out with the wire. I noticed a
+cockroach run over the ice box last night. You must watch that a little,
+even in a new house."
+
+"Ugh!"
+
+"I hope I'm not getting a cold. I feel kind of that way. Mother Becker
+fixed me up fine with that wet cloth around my neck last time. I'll try
+it to-night."
+
+"Come," she said, "breakfast is ready."
+
+They descended to the little oak dining room, quite a glitter of new cut
+glass on the sideboard and the round table white and immaculately
+spread. There was a little maidservant, Lena Obendorfer, the
+fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kemble washerwoman, shy and red rims
+about her eyes from secret tears of homesickness.
+
+"Why, Lena, the breakfast table looks lovely; and don't forget, dearie,
+Mr. Penny takes three eggs in the morning, and he doesn't like his
+rolls heated."
+
+The child, her poor flat face pock-marked, fluttered into service.
+
+Lilly regarded her husband through his meal, elbows on table, cheek in
+her palm. He ate the three two-minute eggs with gusto, alternating with
+deep draughts of coffee, and crisp little ribbons of bacon made into a
+sandwich between his rolls.
+
+"This is certainly delicious bacon."
+
+"Mamma sent a whole one over yesterday."
+
+"I like it lean. Always buy it with plenty of dark streaks through it.
+Don't you like it lean?"
+
+Silence.
+
+"Can't you eat, Lilly? That's a shame."
+
+"Too hot."
+
+"Poor girlie!"
+
+"Lena, bring Mr. Penny some more bacon."
+
+"Certainly delicious. I like it lean."
+
+She watched his temples quiver to the motion of his jaws, her
+unspeakable depression tightening up her tonsils and the very pit of her
+scared and empty.
+
+"Albert--"
+
+"Um-hum!"
+
+"I--What if you should find that I--I'm not--not--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Not right--here. Not the--wife for you."
+
+He leaned over to pinch her cheek, waggling it softly and masticating
+well before he spoke.
+
+"If my little wife suited me any better they would have to chain me
+down. Ah, it's great! I tell you, Lilly, a man makes the mistake of his
+life not to do it earlier. If I had it to do over again I'd marry at
+twenty. Solid comfort. Something to work for. I feel five years closer
+to the general managership than I did six months ago. Certainly fine
+bacon. Best I ever ate."
+
+"Albert--let us not permit our marriage to drag us down into the kind
+of rut we see all about us. Take Flora and Vincent. Married five months
+and she never so much as wears corsets when she takes him to the street
+car, mornings. And he used to be such a clever dresser, and look at him
+now. All baggy. Let's not get baggy, Albert."
+
+"I agree with you there. A man owes it to himself and his business to
+appear well pressed. It's a slogan of mine. Clothes may not make the
+man, but neatness often goes a long way toward making the opportunity.
+Don't you worry about me becoming baggy, Lilly. I'm going to send one of
+those folding ironing boards up from the store this day."
+
+"I don't mean only that. You mustn't be so literal about everything. I
+mean let's not become baggy-minded. Take Flora again. Flora was her
+class poetess and I don't believe she has a literary thought or a book
+in her head now except her account book. Let us improve ourselves,
+Albert. Read evenings and subscribe to the Symphony and the Rubinstein
+Evening Choral."
+
+"Speaking of Rubinstein, Lilly, I'm going to take out a thousand
+dollars' burglary insurance with Eckstein. One cannot be too careful."
+
+She pushed back from the table. "We're invited over to the Duncans'
+to-night for supper. They've one of the new self-playing pianos."
+
+He felt in his waistcoat pocket for the toothpick.
+
+"I'll go if you want it, Lilly, but guess where I'd rather eat my
+supper."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Right here. And fry the sirloin the way Mother Becker does it, Lilly,
+sprinkle a few onions on it. If I were you I wouldn't let Lena
+tackle it."
+
+"This is the third night for beefsteak."
+
+"Fine. You'll learn this about your hubby, he--"
+
+"Don't use that word, Albert. I hate it."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Hubby."
+
+"All right then, husband. Bless her heart, she likes to hear the real
+thing. Well then, your husband is a beefsteak fellow. Let the others
+have all the ruffly dishes they want. Good strong beefsteak is my pace."
+
+She let him lift her face for a kiss.
+
+"I'll be home six-forty-six to the dot. That's what I've figured out it
+takes me if I leave the office at six-five."
+
+He kissed her again, pressing her head backward against the cove of his
+arm, pinching her cheeks together so that her mouth puckered.
+
+"Won't kiss my little wife on the lips this morning. I'm getting a head
+cold. Good-by, Mrs. Penny. Um-m-m! like to say it."
+
+"Good-by."
+
+"Mother Becker coming over to-day?"
+
+"Yes. We had planned to go to the meat market together."
+
+"Fine."
+
+"But I'm not going."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I--don't know. Too hot, I guess."
+
+He looked at her rather intently.
+
+"That's right, Lilly," he said, his eyes, with something new in them,
+roving over her figure; "if you don't feel up to the mark, just you take
+care of yourself. Jove!" he repeated. "Jove!" kissed her again, and went
+down the front steps, whistling.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+At eleven o'clock Mrs. Becker, hatted, crossed the sun-bleached street,
+carrying outheld something that wetted through the snowy napkin that
+covered it. At the door she surrendered it to Lena.
+
+"Put this in the ice box for Mr. Albert's supper. It's some of my
+coldslaw he's so fond of, and a pound of sweet butter, I took from my
+dairyman. See that Miss Lilly never uses it for cooking, Lena; the salt
+butter I brought yesterday is for that."
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"And, Lena," drawing a palm across the banister and showing it up,
+"look. That isn't nice. In my house I go over every piece of woodwork
+from top to bottom on my hands and knees. You mustn't wait for Miss
+Lilly to tell you everything. Where is she?"
+
+"Upstairs, ma'am."
+
+She ascended to a jeremiad of the cardinal laws of housekeeping, palm
+still suspicious. Her daughter rose out of a low mound beside
+the window.
+
+"Good morning, mamma."
+
+"Lilly, you should help upstairs wash days with the housework. Eight
+o'clock and my house is spick span, even my cellar steps wiped down.
+Take off that pink thing and I'll help you make the bed. It was all
+right to wear it around the first week for your husband, but now one of
+your cotton crepes will do. Come, help turn the mattress."
+
+"Oh, mamma, Lena will make the bed."
+
+"Who ever heard of not doing your upstairs work on wash day? Really,
+Lilly, I was ignorant as a bride, too, but I wasn't lazy. I wouldn't
+give a row of pins for--"
+
+"Please, mamma--don't begin."
+
+"Well, it's your house. If it suits your husband, it suits me."
+
+"Well, it does suit him."
+
+"Not if I judge him right. Albert likes order. I went over his socks the
+other day, and he kept them matched up as a bachelor just like a woman
+would. He's methodical."
+
+"Don't lift that heavy mattress alone, mamma. Here, if you insist upon
+doing it, I'll help."
+
+They dressed the bed to its snowy perfection, a Honiton counterpane over
+pink falling almost to the floor.
+
+"Well, that's more like it." Her face quickly moist from exertion, Mrs.
+Becker regarded her daughter across the completed task.
+
+"Now for the carpet sweeper."
+
+Lilly returned to her chair, lying back to fan her face with a lacy
+fribble of pocket handkerchief. "You can wear yourself out if you
+insist, mamma, but I can't see any reason for it. I'm--tired."
+
+Mrs. Becker sat down, hitching her chair toward her daughter's.
+
+"Lilly," she paid, eagerly forward and a highly specialized significance
+in her voice, "don't you feel well--baby?"
+
+"Of course I feel well, mamma. As well as anyone can feel in this heat.
+If only you wouldn't harass me about this--old house."
+
+Mrs. Becker withdrew, her entire manner lifting with her shoulders.
+
+"Well, if that's the way you feel about it, you need not be afraid that
+I'm going to interfere. That's one thing I made up my mind to from the
+start, never to be a professional mother-in-law in my daughter's home.
+The idea!"
+
+"Mamma, I didn't mean it that way, and you know it. I realize that you
+mean well. But I suppose many a family skeleton rattles its bones to the
+tune of 'they meant well.'"
+
+"Lilly, you're not yourself. I'm sure you don't feel well. Baby, you
+mustn't be bashful with your own mother."
+
+"Please, please don't ask me that again in--in that voice. You know I
+always feel well."
+
+"We're both married women now, Lilly. If--if there's anything you want
+to say--"
+
+"No."
+
+"I always say, a single woman doesn't know she's on earth. Isn't it so,
+Lilly?"
+
+Suddenly Lilly shot her hand out to her mother's arm, her fingers
+digging into the flesh.
+
+"You should have told me something--beforehand!"
+
+"I'd have cut out my tongue sooner. What kind of a mother do you think I
+am? Shame!"
+
+"It's wicked to rear a girl with no conception of life."
+
+"You're no greener than I was. That's what a man wants in the girl he
+marries. Innocence."
+
+"Ignorance."
+
+"It all comes naturally to a woman after she's married, life does."
+
+"I--I hate life."
+
+"Lilly!"
+
+"I do! I do! I do!"
+
+"You poor child!" said Mrs. Becker, stroking her hand, and her voice
+pitched to a very private key. "Life is life and what are you going to
+do about it?"
+
+"Only love--some sort of magic potion which Nature uses to drug us, can
+make her methods seem anything but gross--horrible."
+
+"What's on your mind, Lilly? We don't need to be bashful together any
+more. We're married women."
+
+Lilly rose then, moving toward the dresser, drawing the large
+tortoise-shell pins from the smooth coil of her hair.
+
+"If you want me to go to the meat market with you, mamma, I'd better be
+dressing before it gets any hotter."
+
+"You're too warm, Lilly. I'll go myself. You can learn the beef cuts
+later."
+
+"I would rather stay at home and practice awhile. I haven't touched the
+piano since--"
+
+"Tack up your shelf paper while I'm gone, Lilly--your cupboards look so
+bare--and then come over to lunch with me and we'll go to the euchre
+together. It's your first afternoon at the Junior Matrons and I want you
+to look your best. Wear your flowered dimity."
+
+"If you don't mind, mamma, I want to unpack my music this afternoon and
+get my books straightened. I'd rather not go."
+
+"The nerve! And that poor little Mrs. Wempner goes to extra trouble in
+your honor. I hear she's to have pennies attached to the tally cards.
+Pretty idea, pennies for Penny. Well, I'm not going to worry my life
+away! Work it out your own way. I'll send you home a steak and some
+quinine from the drug store for Albert to take to-night."
+
+Presently Lilly heard the lower door slam. It came down across her
+nerves like the descent of a cleaver.
+
+For another hour she sat immovable. A light storm had come up with
+summer caprice, thunder without lightning, and a thin fall of rain that
+hardly laid the dust. There was a certain whiteness to the gloom,
+indicating the sun's readiness to pierce it, but a breeze had sprung up,
+fanning the Swiss curtains in against Lilly's cheek, and across the
+street she could see her mother's shades fly up and windows open to the
+refreshment of it.
+
+At twelve o'clock the telephone rang. It was her husband. "Yes, she was
+well. Pouring downtown? Funny. Only a light shower out there. No, the
+man had not brought the missing caster for the bedstead. Yes,
+six-forty-six, and she would put the steak on at six-twenty. Yes, the
+poultry netting had come. Fine. Bathtub stopper. Yes."
+
+For quite a while after this she sat in the hallway, her hand on the
+instrument, in the attitude of hanging up the receiver.
+
+She did piddle among her books then, a vagabond little collection of
+them. Textbooks, in many cases her initials and graduating year printed
+in lead pencil along the edges. Rolfe's complete edition of Shakespeare.
+A large illustrated edition of Omar Khayyam. Several gift volumes of
+English poets. Complete set of small red Poes that had come free with a
+two-year magazine subscription. Graduation gift of Emerson's essays.
+_Vision of Sir Launfal_. _Journeys to the Homes of Great Men_.
+_Lucille_, in padded leather. An unaccountably present _Life of Cardinal
+Newman_. _The Sweet Girl Graduate_. _Faust_. _How to Interpret Dreams_.
+
+They occupied three shelves of the little case; the remaining two she
+filled in with stacks of sheet music, laying aside ten picked selections
+marked "Repertoire" and occasionally sitting back on her heels to hum
+through the pages of a score. Once she carried a composition to the
+piano, "Who is Sylvia?" to be exact, singing it through to her own
+accompaniment. Her voice lifted nicely against the little square
+confines of reception hall, Lena, absolutely wringing wet with suds and
+perspiration, poking her head up from the laundry stairs.
+
+"Oh, Miss Lilly, that's grand! Please sing it over again."
+
+She did, quickened in spite of herself. Her voice had a pleasant
+plangency, a quality of more yet to come and as if the wells of her
+vitality were far from drained.
+
+She could hear from the laundry the resumed thrubbing and even smell the
+hot suds. The afternoon reeked of Monday. She left off, finally, and
+rocked for a time on the cool porch, watching the long, silent needles
+of rain, wisps of thought floating like feathers.
+
+"Who am I? Lilly Becker. How do I happen to be me? What if I were Melba
+instead? What if Melba were frying the sirloin to-night and five
+thousand people were coming to hear me sing in the Metropolitan Opera
+House? Albert--husband. What a queer word! Husband. Love. Hate.
+Lindsley. Language. How did language ever come to be? We feel, and then
+we try to make sounds to convey that feeling. What language could ever
+convey the boiling inside of me? I must be a sea, full of terrible
+deep-down currents and smooth on top. How does one know whether or not
+he is crazy--mad? How do I know that I am not really singing to five
+thousand? Maybe this is the dream. Page Avenue. Lena in the laundry.
+That sirloin steak being delivered around the side entrance, by a boy
+with a gunny sack for an apron. Dreams. Freud. Suppressed desires.
+That's me. Thousands--thousands of them. Am I my conscious or my
+unconscious self? Can I break through this--this dream into reality?
+Which part of me is here on this front porch and which part is
+Marguerite with the pearls in her hair? Bed casters, they're real. And
+Albert--husband--the rows of days--and nights--nights of my marriage. O
+God, make it a dream! Make it a dream!"
+
+At six-forty-six Albert Penny came home to supper.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+There was nothing consciously premeditated about the astonishing speech
+Lilly made to her husband that evening. Yet it was as if the words had
+been in burning rehearsal, so scuttling hot they came off her lips.
+There had been a coolly quiet evening on the front porch, a telephone
+from Flora Bankhead, a little run-in visit from her parents, and now at
+ten o'clock her husband, shirt-sleeved and before the mirror, tugging to
+unbutton his collar.
+
+She did not want that collar off. It brought, rawly, a sense of his
+possession of her. She sat fully dressed, in her chair beside the
+window, the black irises almost crowding out the gray in her eyes, her
+hands tightening and tightening against that removal of collar. Finally
+one half of it flew open, and on that tremendous trifle Lilly spoke.
+
+"Albert."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Let me go!"
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"It's wrong. I've made a mistake. I don't want to be married."
+
+For a full second he held that pose at his collar button, his entire
+being seeming to suspend a beat.
+
+"What say?" not exactly doubting, but wanting to corroborate his senses.
+
+She was amazed at her ability to reply.
+
+"I said I have made a terrible mistake. I can't stand being married to
+you."
+
+He came toward her with the open side of his collar jerking like an old
+door on its hinges.
+
+"Now lookahere," he said, rather roughly for him; "it's all right for a
+woman to have her whims once in a while, but there are limits. I've been
+as considerate with you as I know how to be. A darn sight more than many
+a man with his woman."
+
+"I'm not that!" she cried, springing to her feet.
+
+"What?"
+
+"That! Your--that!"
+
+"Call it what you want," he said, "all I know is that you're my wife and
+I married you to settle down to a decent, self-respecting home life and
+that a sensible woman leaves her whims behind her."
+
+She stood with her hands to the beat of her throat, looking at him as if
+he had hunted her into her corner, which he had not.
+
+"Let me go," she said.
+
+He seemed trying to gain control of his large, loose hands, clenching
+and unclenching them.
+
+"Good God!" he said. "What say?"
+
+"It's no use! I've tried. I'm wrong. Something in me is stronger than
+you or mamma or papa or--or environment. All my life I've been fighting
+against just--just--this. And now I've let it trap me."
+
+"Darn funny time to be finding it out."
+
+"That's the terrible part! To think it took this--marriage--to awaken me
+to a meaning of myself."
+
+"Bah! Your meaning to yourself is no better than any other woman's."
+
+"A month ago it would have been so simple--to have had the
+courage--then. To have realized then! Why--why can life be like that?"
+
+"Like what?"
+
+"You remember the night coming home from the Highlands? I tried to tell
+you. Something in me was rebelling. Ask mamma; papa. They knew! That's
+been my great trouble. My desires for myself were never strong enough to
+combat their desires for me. They've always placed me under such ghastly
+obligation for their having brought me into the world. Their obligation
+is to _me_, for having brought me here, the accident of their desires!
+But I let the molasses lake of family sentiment--suck--me in. If only I
+had fought harder! It took this trap--marriage! All of a sudden I'm
+awake! Don't try to keep me, Albert. I haven't known until this minute
+that my mind is made up. So made up that it frightens me even more than
+you. I'd rather be on my own in a garret, Albert! It's kinder to tell
+you. We mustn't get into this thing deeper. Nothing can change me.
+Don't try."
+
+She put up her hands as if to ward off some sort of blow, but in her
+heart not afraid, and she wanted to be afraid of him. He did whirl a
+chair toward her by the back, but sat down, jerking her into one
+opposite, facing her so that their knees touched, and she could see the
+spots on his temples that responded so to beefsteak, throbbing. Her
+terror rose a little to the volume of his silence. His head was so
+square. She wanted him to rage and she to hurl herself against his
+storm. Her whole being wanted a lashing. She could pinch herself to the
+capacity of her strength without wincing.
+
+But on the contrary, his voice, when it came, was muted.
+
+"Lilly," he said, "you're sick. You're affected with the heat." His look
+of utter daze irritated her.
+
+"Sick! You mean I was sick before! I'm well now."
+
+"You're either sick or crazy!"
+
+"I'm trapped. I was born trapped, but now I tell you I'm free! Something
+up here in my brain--down here in my heart--has set me free! You can't
+keep me. No one can. I want out!"
+
+"In God's name, what are you driving at?"
+
+"You wouldn't understand. Love might have made you--this--possible, but
+it didn't come. It didn't come, Albert."
+
+He reached for his coat to plunge into it.
+
+"I'm going across for your mother and father. I'm afraid of you. There
+is something behind all this. One of us is crazy!"
+
+"No, no, Albert. Please, not them. I'll run out of the house if they
+come. They've defeated me so often. That terrible wall they erect--out
+of flesh that bleeds every time I try to climb it. They've killed me
+with the selfishness of their love, those two. They put me body and soul
+into Chinese shoes the day I was born. I've never ceased paying up for
+being their child. Suppose they did sacrifice for me--clothe me--feed
+me--what does parenthood mean but that? Don't you dare to call them
+over! Don't you dare!"
+
+"In God's name, then, what!"
+
+"Just let me go, Albert--quietly."
+
+"Where?"
+
+She went toward him, her fine white throat palpitating as if her heart
+were beating up in it, something even wheedling in her voice.
+
+"I've thought it all out, Albert. These unbearable days since--this.
+I'll go quietly; I'll take the blame. In these cases where a woman
+leaves it becomes desertion--"
+
+"If you're talking divorce, I'll see you burn like brimstone before
+I'll sacrifice my respectability in this community before your
+damn whims."
+
+She quivered, and it was a full second before she was able to continue.
+
+"I know, Albert, to you it sounds--worse, probably, than it is. But
+think how much worse, how degrading it would be for me to stay here--in
+your house--hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we
+don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of
+society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a
+shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath.
+Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns
+her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on
+respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me go,
+Albert. To Chicago. I was there once with mamma and papa to the Rope and
+Hemp Manufacturers' Convention. Or, better still, New York. That's the
+field for my kind of work. Many a girl with less voice than I has gotten
+on there. Albert, won't you let me go?"
+
+He was like nothing so much as a cornered bull, trying to bash his
+bewildered head through the impenetrable wall of things. Little red
+shreds had come out in the white of his eyes; he was sweating coarsely
+and feeling the corners of his mouth with his tongue.
+
+"You won't ruin my name--you won't ruin my name."
+
+"I'll take the blame. I'll love taking it. You'll have a clean case of
+desertion--"
+
+Suddenly he took a step toward her with the threat of a roar in his
+voice, and again she found relief in the rising velocity of his anger
+and practically thrust herself in the hope of a blow.
+
+"What are you that I am married to," he cried, "a she-devil? What have
+I got to do? Treat you like one? Huh? Huh?"
+
+He stopped just short of her, the upper half of his body thrust backward
+from restraining his impulse to lunge, his face distorted and quivering
+down at her.
+
+"Be careful," he said. "By God! be careful when I get my blood up. The
+woman don't live that can touch my respectability. If you go, you go
+without a divorce. You're trying to harm me--ruin my life--that's what
+you are. Ruin my life." And suddenly, before the impulse to strike had
+traveled down his tightening arm, collapsed weakly, his entire body
+retched by the dry sobs that men weep. He could so readily arouse her
+aversion, that even now, with a quick pity for him stinging her
+eyeballs, she could regard him dispassionately, a certain disgust for
+him uppermost.
+
+He turned toward her finally with the look of a stricken St. Bernard
+dog, his lower lids salt-bitten and showing half moons of red flesh.
+
+"What is it, Lilly? What have I failed in? For God's sake tell me and
+I'll make it right."
+
+"That's the terrible part, Albert. You haven't failed. You're _you_.
+It's something neither of us can control any more than we can control
+the color of our eyes. It's as if I were a--a problem in chemistry that
+had reacted differently than was expected and blew off the top
+of things."
+
+"Bah! the trouble with you women to-day is that you've got an itch that
+you don't know how to scratch. Well, it's high time for you to learn a
+way to scratch yours by settling down like a respectable married woman
+has to." His voice rising and his wrongs red before him: "I wish to God
+I'd never laid eyes on you. I thought you were more sensible than most
+and I find you a crazy woman."
+
+"Then, Albert, you don't want a crazy woman for your wife!"
+
+"Ah no, you don't! No, you don't! I've worked like a dog to get where I
+am. I'm a respected member of this community and I intend to stay one.
+No woman gets a divorce out of me unless over my dead body. I'm a leader
+of a Bible class and an officer in my lodge. I wore a plume and gold
+braid at the funeral of the mayor of this town. I'm first-assistant
+buyer and I propose to become general manager. I'm a respectable citizen
+trying to settle down to a respectable home, and, by God! no woman
+tomfoolery is going to bamboozle me out of it."
+
+She sat with her eyes closed, tears seeping through them, and her fist
+beating softly into her palm.
+
+"Oh, Albert--Albert--how can I make you understand? My brain is
+bursting--"
+
+"Lilly," he interrupted, explosively reaching out and closing over her
+wrist, and sudden perception lifting his voice, "I know! You--you're not
+well! You're ailing. Women aren't--aren't always quite themselves--at
+times. You--Lilly--could it be--"
+
+"No! No! No! I'll go mad if you, too, begin to insinuate--that! I'm
+myself, I tell you. Never more so in my life."
+
+He regarded her through frank and even tender tears, his voice humoring
+her.
+
+"Of course, you're high strung, Lilly, and a high-strung woman is like a
+high-strung horse, has to be handled lightly. Don't exert yourself.
+If--if I'm embarrassing to you--talk to mother. These are the times a
+girl needs her mother. You go ahead and pick on me to your heart's
+content. I--I'm a pretty slow kind of fellow about some things. Never
+been around women enough. Come, it's ten-thirty-six. You need all the
+sleep you can get. Come, Lilly. Why--I--I've been thick-headed--that's
+all."
+
+She suffered him to kiss her on the cheek as she turned her face from
+him.
+
+"Have it your own way," she said, limp with a sudden sense of futility
+and as if all the reflex resiliency had oozed out of her.
+
+"We're all right together, Lilly. Just don't you worry your head. We'll
+get adjusted in no time. You and--and mother talk things over to-morrow.
+I've been a thick-headed old fool. Pshaw! I--Pshaw!"
+
+She moved to the dresser, removing pins until her hair fell shiningly
+all over her, brushing through its thick fluff and weaving it into two
+heavy braids over her shoulders. He laid hesitant and rather clumsy
+hands to its thickness.
+
+"Fine head of hair."
+
+She jumped back as if a pain had stabbed her.
+
+"Don't forget, Albert, to lock the downstairs windows."
+
+He was full of new comprehensions.
+
+"I understand. Take your time to undress, Lilly. I'll be about fifteen
+minutes locking up, and I want to attach some new safety locks I brought
+with me. Everything all right?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You don't need to keep the light burning."
+
+"I won't."
+
+He opened his lips to say something, but, instead, turned and went out,
+the closed half of his collar drenched in perspiration.
+
+When he returned, after a generous fifteen minutes, the room was in
+darkness except for a thin veil of whiteness from the arc light in the
+street. Between the sweetly new sheets the long, supple mound of Lilly
+lay along the bed, her bare arms close to her body.
+
+Her breathing was sufficiently deep to simulate sleep. He undressed in
+the darkness and the silence.
+
+Half the night through he tossed, keeping carefully to the bed edge, and
+often she heard him sigh out and was conscious that he mopped
+continually at the back of his hands. Once he whispered her name.
+
+"Lilly--awake?"
+
+She deepened her breathing.
+
+About four o'clock he dozed off, swooning deeply into sleep, his lips
+opening and a slight snore coming.
+
+She lay with her eyes open to the darkness, letting it lave over her as
+if it were water and she had drowned in it with her gaze wide.
+
+She felt bathed in a colorless fluid of unreality. Those Swiss window
+curtains! To what era of her consciousness did their purchase belong?
+She and her mother had shopped them at Gentle's. They hung now lightly
+against the darkness. The blond girl who had sold them to her must be
+sleeping now, too, in this same curious pool of unreality. She lay sunk
+in a strange pause. Once she propped herself on an elbow, gazing across
+the street to the blank front of her parents' house. They were sleeping
+behind that middle upper window, their clothing folded across chairs, as
+if waiting. How eagerly they would greet their new day of small duties,
+small pleasures, and small emotions. What gave them the courage to meet
+the years of days cut off one identical pattern, like a whole regiment
+of paper dolls cut from a folded newspaper? She began to count. Uncle
+Buck, five hundred. Grandma Ploag, one hundred. Mamma and papa, one
+hundred and fifty. Seven hundred and fifty in the bank in her name! Her
+own little checking account. The tan-bound check book. The new tan
+valise, monogrammed, L.B.P. The stack of music marked "Repertoire." New
+York! She fell to trembling, forcing herself into rigidity when the
+figure beside her stirred. She was burning with fever and wanted to
+plunge from the cool sheets. She could have run a mile--two.
+
+Instead, she lay the long night through, her mind a loom weaving a
+tapestry of her plan of action, and dawn came up pink, hot, and
+cloudless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+At seven o'clock her husband awakened with an ejaculation that landed
+him sitting on the bed edge. She lay with her eyes closed, wanting not
+to blink. He dressed silently, but she could hear him tiptoeing about,
+and finally lay with her hands clenched against the gargling noises that
+came through the closed door of the bathroom. At last she was conscious
+that, fully dressed, he was standing beside her, looking down. She could
+tell by the aroma of mouth wash.
+
+"Lilly?" he said, in a coarse whisper.
+
+She continued to simulate sleep.
+
+"Lilly!"
+
+She did not employ the deception of a start, but opened her eyes quietly
+to meet his.
+
+"Lazy!" he said. "It is twenty-six minutes past seven."
+
+"So late?" she said, twisting into a long, luxurious yawn. He kissed her
+directly on that yawn between the open lips.
+
+"You stay in bed this morning. Rest up."
+
+"I think I will, Albert, if you don't mind."
+
+"You turn right over and have your nap out. I'll be home at
+six-forty-six."
+
+"Good-by, Albert," she said into the crotch of her elbow.
+
+He kissed her again on the ear lobe and the nape of her neck.
+
+"Good-by, Lilly, and if I were you I'd have a little talk with mother
+if I found myself not feeling just right. I'm sending Joe up with a pair
+of granite scrub buckets and that stopper for the bathtub. All right?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+After a while she could hear him below, the tink of breakfast cutlery
+and the little passings in and out of Lena through the swinging pantry
+door. Then the front door closed gently, and on its click she swung
+herself lightly out of bed, standing barefooted behind the Swiss
+curtains to watch the square-shouldered figure swing across the street
+toward the Page Avenue car. Her energy to be up and doing suddenly
+unstoppered, she turned back to the room, jerking out a dresser drawer
+until it flew out to the floor.
+
+At nine o'clock she was still in her nightdress, sloughing about in an
+engagement gift of little blue knitted bedroom slippers. There were the
+new valise and an old dress-suitcase tightly packed and shoved beneath
+the bed, and over a chair a tan-linen suit inserted with strips of
+large-holed embroidery that had been dyed in coffee by Katy Stutz. It
+had originally been designed as a traveling suit for a honeymoon trip to
+Excelsior Springs until that project had been decided against in favor
+of immediate possession of the little house.
+
+"Put that extra money into your furniture," Mrs. Becker had advised, to
+which Albert had been highly amenable.
+
+There was a large _piece de resistance_ of a hat, too, floppy of brim
+and borne down at one spot by an enormous flat satin rose. Lilly had
+rebelled against its cart-wheel proportions, but in the end her mother's
+selection prevailed.
+
+She dressed hurriedly, emerging from her bath with her hair wet at the
+edges, but combing back easily into its smoothness.
+
+Her nervousness conveyed itself to her mostly through her breathing; it
+was short and very fast, but she was as cool of the flesh as the fresh
+linen she donned. That was part of the clean young wonder of her. Her
+vitality flowed and showered back upon itself, like the ornamental
+waters of a fountain. She awoke like a rose with the dew on. Even Albert
+Penny, rubbing the grit out of his eyes, had marveled at the matinal
+bloom of her.
+
+She ran in her movements, closing drawers and doors after her to keep
+down her rising sense of confusion, pinning where fingers could not wait
+to fit hook to eye. There were twenty-eight dollars in her little
+brown-leather purse and a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars,
+payable to "self," in a little chamois bag around her neck.
+
+The pretty solitaire engagement ring, a little aquamarine breastpin,
+gift of the groom, a gold band bracelet, and after some hesitation her
+wedding ring, she placed in an envelope in the now empty top dresser
+drawer, scribbling across it, "Valuable." She pried it open again after
+sealing, to drop in a tiny gold chain with a pearl-and-turquoise drop,
+still another gift, suggested by her mother to the bridegroom. Finally,
+there were the little trinkets of more remote days which she dropped
+into her purse. A rolled-gold link bracelet dangling a row of friendship
+hearts. Her class pin. A tiny reproduction on porcelain, like the one
+burned into the china plate in the parlor, of her parents, cheek to
+cheek. Regarding it, her throat tightened and she sat down suddenly.
+
+"O God!" she said, half audibly, "what am I doing?" But on the second
+she cocked her head to a passer-by and finally leaned out to hail in a
+neighborhood man of all work, paying him a dollar and car fare to carry
+her bags down to the new Union Station and check them. Seeing them
+lugged out of the house was another moment when it seemed to her that
+she must faint of the crowding around her heart.
+
+Lena she dispatched to the grocer's on the homely errand of beeswax for
+ironing, and, trembling to take advantage of the interval of her
+absence, hurried into her jacket and hat, her face deeply within the
+wide brim. Opposite, her mother was scrubbing an upper window sill, the
+brush grating against the silence. She waited behind the Swiss curtains
+for the figure to withdraw.
+
+The wide, peaceful morning filled with order and sunshine! The pleasant
+greeny light cast by awnings into her bedroom. What devil dance was in
+her blood? What prickly rash lay under her being? Her mother at that
+ordered scrubbing of the window sill! Her eyes swung the smaller orbit
+of the room. The rumpled bed. That discarded collar on the dresser, the
+two stretched buttonholes like two tiny mouths. That collar...
+
+She caught up her purse and ran downstairs. Her telephone was ringing
+violently as she hurried toward the Page Avenue car.
+
+On the ride down there occurred one of those incidents that sometimes
+leap out like a long arm of coincidence pointing the way. A classmate
+with whom she had once sung in the Girl's High School Glee Club, and
+whom she had long lost sight of, sat down beside her.
+
+"Why, it's Lilly Becker!"
+
+"Vera Wohlgemuth!"
+
+"Of all people! The same pretty and stylish Lilly."
+
+Remembering Vera's readiness with the platitude, Lilly smiled down upon
+her.
+
+"And you, too, Vera, you look natural"--but the words almost petered out
+on her lips. Much of Vera's slender prettiness was gone. She had gone
+hippy, as the saying is, even her face insidiously wider and
+coarser pored.
+
+"What are you doing, Vera? Have you kept up your music?"
+
+"Oh no! I'm married!"
+
+There was a little click to the finish of that speech that seemed
+automatically to lock against the intrusion of old dreams.
+
+"A ten-months-old daughter furnishes me all the music I have time for.
+Didn't I read where you got married, Lilly?"
+
+"Yes. You had such a pretty touch on the piano, Vera."
+
+"Why, I don't believe I've opened the piano in six months! Marriage
+knocks it out of you pretty quick, don't it? And, say, wait until the
+babies begin to come. I said to him last night, 'Ed, why is marriage
+like quicksands?' He's no good at conundrums. 'Because it sucks you
+down,' I said, and he didn't even see the point. But it's a fact, isn't
+it? Mine is city salesman for the Mound City Shoe Company.
+What's yours?"
+
+"With Slocum-Hines."
+
+"Lucille Wright is married. And remember Edna Ponscarme? Twins. Nine
+months to a day. Maybe she wasn't in a hurry! And Stella Loire, the
+class beauty? She wheels her past our house on her way to market every
+morning. More like the class dishrag now. Well, well! it does seem
+funny. Lilly Becker married and settled down like the rest of us, and
+we had you down in the class prophecy for a famous opera singer.
+Well, well!"
+
+At Eighteenth Street Lilly left the car, transferring for Union Station.
+A sudden exultation was racing through her. She sat well forward on her
+seat, as if that could quicken transit.
+
+Union Station, one of the first of those dividend-built and
+dividend-building terminals that were to spring up quickly and
+palatially the country over, rose with a peculiarly American trick out
+of one of the most squalid sections of the city. Fifteen railroads
+threaded into it, a gaseous shed _de luxe_, picking up St. Louis like a
+gigantic bead upon the necklace of commerce.
+
+The coughing of steam up against a glass roof threw off repetitions of
+self. The boom of a train announcer's voice rang out, the echoes fitting
+smaller and smaller into one another like a collapsible drinking cup. A
+hither and thither! A bustle that caught Lilly up into it. She was
+immediately drunk with the moment and train smoke. Life was a gigantic
+drum, beating.
+
+The clerk at the Terminal Hotel, Mrs. Kemble's brother-in-law, in fact,
+cashed her check for her, without question, but a sort of unspoken
+askance, sending it across the street, with his additional indorsement,
+to a bank. There were six one-hundred-dollar bills, two fifties, and
+five tens. She folded their considerable bulk into the bag around
+her neck.
+
+True to direction, the checks for her bags had been left at the
+Information Desk in an addressed envelope. A porter scurried for them.
+
+Backed by the precedent of the trip to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and
+Chicago, she bought her ticket, and then, rather more reluctantly and
+against her sense of thrift, a berth, which already necessitated a
+foray into the little chamois bag.
+
+Last, she dropped an already stamped and addressed envelope into the
+station mail box, her heart seeming to swoon to her feet as she did so.
+It contained a half-hundredth version of a week-old letter finally
+reduced to:
+
+MY DEAREST PARENTS,--When you receive this I will be on my way. I won't
+try to explain my action except that now I see plainly my entire life
+has been directed toward this moment.
+
+Had I found this courage two months ago a great deal of suffering might
+have been spared one person, at least. I cannot say enough for Albert's
+patient struggle to make possible the impossible, or for you, my dear
+parents, for whom my love is as great as my rebellion.
+
+I am not leaving an address. That would be useless. My decision is
+unalterable. It is futile to come after or try to find me. In a large
+city I will immediately become a needle in a haystack and that is what I
+want and need for my work. Do not worry. You know very well I can take
+excellent care of myself, and in case of unforeseen accident I will
+always be identified by your name and address on me. So by my very
+silence you are to know I am well and happy. Some day, when success has
+justified this seemingly rash step, who knows what happy reunion may be
+in store for us?
+
+Take Albert into your home. He will be a better son to you than I have
+been a daughter. God bless you all. LILLY.
+
+At ten-five the B. & O. Limited, for New York, pulled out. In a Pullman,
+her bags on the seat opposite and her hands locked so that her finger
+nails bit in, sat Lilly, gazing out over the moving landscape of dirty,
+uneven fringe of city. Crossing Eads Bridge, the higher and lighter
+rumble of the train, induced by steel over water, was like thin soprano
+laughter with ice in it.
+
+She was suddenly terrifyingly conscious of an impulse to join in that
+laughter--to laugh and to laugh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+There is a sense of detachment from this old planet of ours goes with
+travel, that is not unlike that instant when the pole vaulter's feet are
+farthest off ground. It seemed to Lilly, after a while, that both her
+starting point and her destination had fallen away. She hung in
+abeyance. She was the unanchored streak of a rocket through space.
+
+Time was dropping away from her with a sense of the same steep declivity
+that could awaken her out of a doze to a sense of falling. She was
+rolling through the pleasant monotony of Indiana, against the light
+slant of a morning suddenly turned rainy. Quick diagonal streaks flecked
+the pane and she could see the drops spat down into a thick white-plush
+road, clipping it of nap.
+
+The sleeper was quite empty save for a medley of drummers' talk and the
+rattle of chips from the smoking room and an old man in a skull cap who
+dozed incessantly. Even the porter dozed. She sat the day through
+without responding to calls for meals, the rain falling steadily now
+like a curtain. At five o'clock the lamps were already burning and a
+rash of little lights began to break out over the landscape.
+
+"Some day," she mused, "I'll look back upon all this and laugh. I'll
+tell it in a newspaper interview. Lillian Ploag. No, Luella Ploag.
+Ploag. No-o, Luella--Luella Parlow! Not bad. Luella Parlow!"
+
+She asked a passing porter the time.
+
+"Six-forty-six!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She slept fitfully, awakening with little exclamations, and once came so
+suddenly out of a doze that she awoke sitting bolt upright, bumping her
+head against the top of the berth. Cup her hands as she would against
+the window pane, she could not see out, but it seemed to her that dawn
+must be imminent. She felt for her little watch, leaning to the streak
+of light the curtains let in. Ten-five! Not yet midnight. She lay back
+on the gritty bed, trembling.
+
+At six o'clock there were still stars, but a coral tremor was against
+the sky line and clouds coming up furiously. Suddenly she realized that
+the clouds were mountains and that the flat territory had flowed through
+the night into Pennsylvania mountains that were like plunging waves, and
+with the changed physiognomy, her mood quickened. She would not wait for
+the sun, dressing in her berth.
+
+At eight o'clock, and for only the third time in her life, she
+breakfasted in a dining car. It was well crowded, the old man in the
+skull cap across the aisle from her gouging out an orange. She ordered
+with a sense of novelty and thrift, passing on from grilled spring
+chicken, bar-le-duc, and honey-dew melon to eggs and bacon. A drummer
+with a gold-mounted elk's tooth dangling from his chain ogled her, so
+she sat very prim of back, gazing out over flying villages that were
+like white-pine toys cut in the cisalpine Alps and invitingly more
+clipped and groomed than the straggling Indiana towns of yesterday. She
+was cruelly conscious of self, and throughout the meal kept the tail of
+her glance darting at her surroundings, dropping a piece of toast once
+and apologizing to the waiter, continuing to smile in an agony of strain
+after the incident. She ate slowly, her little finger at right angle to
+her movements, masticating with closed lips, her napkin constantly
+dabbing up at them.
+
+Finally the head waiter, who had been hovering, to Lilly's great
+discomfiture, directly at her shoulder, steered a young woman, with a
+great deal of very fuzzy light-brown hair about her face, to the empty
+seat opposite. She had a certain air of chic, was modishly dressed, wore
+no rings except a marriage band, and long pink nails with careful half
+moons. With the ripple of a thrill over her, Lilly registered her as
+"typical New Yorker." As a matter of fact, she was the wife of a teacher
+of physics in Brooklyn Manual Training School, returning from a two
+weeks' visit to her mother-in-law in Indianapolis.
+
+She ordered with somewhat of a manner, asking for an immediate cup of
+hot water, and to Lilly there was something esoteric even in that. The
+sturdy, fine machine of her own body had the crass ability to start off
+the day with bacon and eggs. She blushed for the healthiness of
+her choice.
+
+A patter of conversation sprang up between them, something like this:
+
+"Would you mind passing me the sugar?"
+
+"Why, certainly not!" from an eager Lilly.
+
+"Going all the way to New York?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Live there?"
+
+"No. Do you?"
+
+"Yes, since my marriage."
+
+"Do you like it?"
+
+"New York is not a point of view, my dear. It's a habit. Your system
+comes to demand it just as an opium fiend comes to require so many
+pipefuls. You know it's bad for you, but the fumes are delicious."
+
+"What fumes?"
+
+"The fumes of the metropolis, my dear. The perfumes of wealth. The next
+best to being Mrs. Four Hundred herself is to walk past her Fifth Avenue
+home and see her step out of her automobile."
+
+"I suppose so, if wealth is what one craves most."
+
+"It isn't a craving in New York; it's a necessity. But to those of us to
+whom life is pretty much of a compromise anyway, there is something in
+mere propinquity to wealth that is like smelling into a tumbler with its
+sides still wet from some rare old chartreuse. It isn't filling, but
+it's heady."
+
+"That's exactly the way I feel about life; it's worth going after if you
+only get the aroma. If I can't be Venus, then let me be the star dust
+that is nearest to her!"
+
+It seemed to Lilly that she was suddenly talking to her own kind. New
+York spoke her language.
+
+"Fearful coffee. I always say the only place outside of my own
+percolator I can get a decent cup of coffee is the new Hudson."
+
+"The Hudson? Is that a good hotel?"
+
+"Yes, splendid. Are you alone?"
+
+There occurred to Lilly a swift talent for the moment.
+
+"Certainly," she said, shaping her own voice into a petard against the
+little clang of surprise in the voice of her _vis-a-vis_. "I always
+travel alone. I'm a professional."
+
+"Really?" her glance running over the somewhat florid details of the
+corn-colored linen. "With that fine chest, I'll warrant you're
+a singer."
+
+"Right."
+
+"I wonder if you know Margaret Mazarin."
+
+"Indeed I do, from hearsay."
+
+"Well, we virtually gave Margaret her start. Madge Evans is her real
+name. My husband grew up next door to her in Indianapolis. She
+practically used to make our apartment her home. One day when she was
+about as close to bed rock as a girl could be, my husband said to her:
+'Madge, if the managers won't give you a hearing, why don't you try some
+of those agencies in the Pittman Building in Longacre Square? I see all
+sorts of musical and theatrical agencies' signs on the windows.' Bless
+us, if the very first one to which she applied didn't give her the
+position that indirectly led her straight to the Metropolitan! Some one
+connected with one of the biggest patrons of the opera heard her singing
+down at a little old ten-twenty-and-thirty theater and got her an
+audience right off."
+
+"Oh," cried Lilly, her face ardent, "if only--I--some day--"
+
+"Yes," continued her companion, dipping into her finger bowl and pushing
+back, "Madge always says it was that tip from my husband, a mere chance
+suggestion, gave her a start."
+
+"Wonderful!"
+
+They paid, each her check, leaving small womanish tips beside their
+saucers.
+
+"Well, I hope some day to have the pleasure of hearing you sing. Are you
+in concert?"
+
+"Oh yes, concert."
+
+"I must watch for your name," digging down into a reticule for a bit of
+cardboard. "Mine is Towser--Mrs. Seymour Towser. What is yours?"
+
+"Mine? Lilly Penny," she replied, her whole body flashing to rescind
+the word no sooner than it was spoken. "Lilly-Penny-Parlow."
+
+They swayed their way through the chain of cars, Lilly's coach running
+two ahead of her companion's.
+
+"Well, good-by, Miss Parlow, I hope we meet again some day."
+
+"Good-by," said Lilly, making her way relievedly through two more cars
+of aisle.
+
+Once in her seat, she withdrew hastily from her valise a small red
+memorandum book, giltly inscribed "Mid-West Insurance Company," plying a
+quick and small chirography on to its first page:
+
+     Pittman Building, Longacre Square.
+     Hudson Hotel.
+
+The day, which for Lilly began with the tickle of aerial champagne,
+petered out humiliatingly. Quite without the precedent of the previous
+trip to Buffalo, Niagara Palls, and Chicago, train-sickness set in and
+the remainder of the day was spent hunched with her face to the prickly
+hot plush of the seat, her hair and linen suit awry, and not a spot on
+the pillow mercifully proffered by the porter that would remain cool to
+her cheek.
+
+It was well past nine o'clock, and two hours behind schedule, when a
+very limp and rumpled Lilly followed the weary straggle of weary
+passengers through the pale fog of the New Jersey station to the waiting
+ferry. She found a place at the very bow, and, standing there beside her
+bags, hat off to the sudden kiss of fresh air, her prostrated senses
+seemed to lift.
+
+There was something Trojan, Illiadic, in the way in which they moved out
+presently, to bay. The first tang of salt air, that rotten,
+indescribable smell of the sea, tickled her nostrils. It was all she
+could do to keep from being drunk with it. She felt skittish. She wanted
+to kick up.
+
+The approach was not spectacular. The great spangled flank of herself
+which New York turns to her harbor had just about died down, only a
+lighted tower jutting above the gauze of fog like a chateau perched on a
+mountain. Fog horns sent up rockets of dissonance. Peer as she would,
+Lilly could only discern ahead a festoon of lights each smeared a bit
+into the haze.
+
+She began her trick of dramatizing the moment. She wanted suddenly to
+claw apart the dimness with her finger nails. She wanted to lean into
+the beyond, to wind herself in that necklace of lights out there and
+bend back until she touched the floor of the universe.
+
+They slid into slip. Chains dropped. There was a sudden plunge forward.
+Night was day, white arc lights grilling into a vast black shed. A few
+automobiles and a line of horse cabs backed up against a curb--the
+one-horse variety that directly antedated the general use of the
+taxicab. A porter shoved her bags into one of these, the driver leaning
+an ear down off his box.
+
+"Where to, miss?"
+
+"Hudson Hotel," she said, sitting back against the leather tufting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+They rattled over the cobblestones until her very flesh shivered, and
+she bit into her tongue and her hands bounced as they lay in her lap,
+and, trying to peer out of the window, she bumped her head, and finally
+sat back, forced to be inert as she bumbled over the deep narrow streets
+of lower Manhattan which at night become deserted runways to slaughter,
+ghostly with the silent thunder of a million stampeding feet.
+
+It was ten o'clock when they finally drew up at the side entrance of the
+hotel in a street disappointingly narrow, but which seemed to burst,
+just a few feet beyond, into a wildly tossed stream of light,
+pedestrians, and, above all, a momentum of traffic that was like the
+fast toss of a mountain stream. The cab fare was overwhelmingly large.
+Her bags disappeared; she followed them, immediately enveloped in an
+atmosphere of upholstery, mosaic floors that seemed to slide from under
+her, palms that leaned out of corners, crystal chandeliers, uniforms,
+rivulets of music. She had dined upon several occasions at the Planters'
+Hotel in St. Louis, and had once spent a night at the Briggs House,
+Chicago, and the Hotel Imperial at Niagara Palls, and had objected when
+her father signed, "B. T. Becker, Wife and Daughter," taking the pen to
+write out her own name boldly under his, and upon all summer excursions
+had taken upon herself the ordering of the family meals.
+
+But the Hudson awed her, the very Carrara magnitude of the walls, the
+remote gold-leaf ceilings, light-studded, the talcy odor _de luxe_. She
+wanted to back out of that lobby of groups of well-dressed loungers; to
+turn; to run. Instead, she wrote her name on the register, marveling at
+her steady chirography:
+
+Luella Parlow, Dallas
+
+A narrow clerk scanned the bulk of her baggage, unhooked some keys, and
+called, "Front." She was mildly taken for granted and her assurance
+stiffened.
+
+"Bath?"
+
+"What are your rates?"
+
+"Three-fifty and up."
+
+"Yes--bath."
+
+He shifted among his keys and she noticed that when she returned the pen
+to him his hand lingered just too long. She had a way of lifting her
+eyebrows to express her archest scorn. The smile on the clerk's face did
+not die, but neither did it widen.
+
+She shot upward in an elevator. She padded her way through long hallways
+deeply carpeted to eat in footfalls. It seemed to her they must have
+rounded a city square of those hallways, door after door after door as
+imperturbable as eyeless masks, and yet which somehow seemed to look on.
+
+"Anything else, ma'am?"
+
+"Nothing." She interpreted his wait and felt for a ten-cent piece. He
+shifted the key to the room inside of the door and went out.
+
+She was alone in a twelfth-story room that enhanced her aerial sense of
+light-headedness. She looked at the bed. Curly birch with a fine sense
+of depth to its whiteness. There was a glass top on the dresser, with a
+lace scarf beneath it which appealed to her sense of novelty. Also an
+extra light above it which she jerked on, peering at herself in
+the mirror.
+
+There were soot rims about her eyes, and when she removed her hat her
+hair was glued to her brow in its outline. But just the same, the pollen
+that gave to her skin its velvetiness was there. She leaned to the
+mirror, baring her teeth to scan their whiteness; turned her profile as
+if to appraise its strong, sure cast; swelled her chest after the manner
+of inhaling for an octave, letting her hand ride on it. Then she
+undressed slowly, luxuriating in a deep hot bath that rested her as she
+lay back in it. She even washed her hair, wrapping it finally in one of
+the thick turkish towels, and then leaned out of her window for a while,
+her body well over the sill, and the air, with a cool washed quality to
+it, flowing through her nightdress. She looked down on what she thought
+must be the bosom of Broadway. Actually it was Forty-fourth Street. An
+ocean of roofs billowed under her gaze.
+
+She thought of Tuefelsdroeck alone with his stars. Or rather, wanted to
+think of herself as thinking of him.
+
+A telephone directory on the desk caught her eye. For an hour she pored
+over its pages, names that had blazoned themselves incandescently from
+the pages of musical reviews and magazines mixed in casually with the
+clayey ones of mere persons. A thrill shot over her with each encounter.
+The book began to exhale an odor of sanctity.
+
+It was two o'clock when she turned off her lights, just enough glow from
+the hallway pressing against her transom to reassure her. The sheets
+were fragrant with cleanliness and she let her body give to the
+delicious sag of the mattress. The rumble of the train was gone from
+her ears. She felt washed, light, drowsy; cast aside her pillow; wound
+her arm up under her head; sighed out of deliciousness; slept.
+
+She awoke with a sense of red. A flame of fear shot through her, and a
+first thought of fire, but even before she could rise she saw it was
+static, this crimson gash across the blackness, and shaped like a grin.
+
+She began to tremble, and an unreasoning fear of the depth of the
+darkness to take hold of her. A sort of paralysis locked her, and,
+although she wanted to scream, she lay there drenched in terror.
+Finally, out of contempt for her fear, she sprang, landing both feet on
+the floor.
+
+A little window in the box of the wall telephone, one of those modern
+hotel devices _de luxe_ and _de trop_, had flashed up redly, spelling
+out to her dilated gaze, "MAIL IN YOUR BOX." Regarding it, her relief
+shifted suddenly to terror. Mail! Not even had she herself known what
+her address might be! Her mother--father--Albert? But how? The drummer
+with the gold-mounted elk's tooth! The clerk and that almost
+imperceptible trail of the hand. Detectives! Her window showed a streak
+of dawn. Five-forty by her watch. She tried to go back to bed, but at
+six she was up again, dressed fumblingly, finally sliding the linen
+jacket over an unbuttoned blouse. She had some difficulty locating the
+elevator, scurrying through the deserted halls only to dash herself
+against repeated _cul-de-sacs_. It was almost seven when she descended
+into a lobby that was littered with sawdust in the sweeping up.
+
+She asked for her mail, a strange clerk handing it out to her without
+askance, and hurried to a chair behind a pillar, holding the envelope
+between the folds of her skirt without glancing at it, and trying to
+hide the trembling of her arm. She sat down, forcing her hand around and
+her gaze to meet it. The envelope was blank; she tore its flap and read:
+"Valet Service. Suits Cleaned and Pressed in One Hour."
+
+And then she went out into 7 A.M. Broadway, all swept clean and caroling
+with the song of the car gong and the whistlings of steamboats. A
+line-up of theaters, early-morning mausoleums of last night's madnesses,
+first met her eye in the clean light. One of them was violently postered
+with lithographs of Minnie Maddern Fiske. A three-sheet proclaimed
+Melba. Broadway became an Olympus, every passer-by a probable immortal.
+She half expected to pass John Drew there as the Rialto cleaned its
+cuspidors, polished its brass, and swept its front. She thought she
+caught a flash of Margaret Mazarin in a cab. An exultant chill raced
+over her at the vertical sign, "Rector's." A musical comedy full of
+frothy and naughty allusions to Rector's had once played Forest Park
+Highlands, St. Louis. It was like strolling the pages of an illustrated
+magazine. Some one jostled her and smiled around very closely into her
+face. Suddenly her eyebrows shot up. It seemed to her that the face
+under the gray derby hat was as coldly and as bonelessly fat as an
+oyster. Her two hands could have met around the little neck which was
+tightly incased in a soft blue collar held with a gold bar pin. She
+quickened her step and, what with the lifted brows, promptly lost him.
+
+She stopped finally at a florid lace-and-glass-fronted restaurant on
+Forty-third Street, with a mimeographed breakfast menu up against the
+window. Her food went down through a throat constricted against it. Her
+tightness would not relax.
+
+At half after eight she was back once more in her room, changing from
+the tan linen into a pink mull, heavily inserted, too, and throwing up
+quite an aura of rosiness about her. She had only the tan hat, too wide
+and too floppy of brim, but it had a picturesque value, which is a
+greater selling quality than _chic_. In fact, in her own eyes, as she
+tilted the mirror for a full-length view, the art of Katy Stutz stood
+unimpeached. Eying her reflection in the mirrored walls of the elevator,
+she felt as pinkly blown as a rose, and looked it. A head or two turned
+after her youth. At the desk she inquired for the Pittman Building. Just
+opposite! A policeman held up traffic to let her cross. She picked a
+name off a third-story window, "Barnett Bureau--Musical Service," and
+rode up to it.
+
+By one of those astonishing flukes of beginner's good fortune, upon the
+occasion of this very first effort Lilly obtained.
+
+A ground-glass door opened into a room the size and bareness of a
+packing case and crammed to its capacity with a roller-top desk, a
+stenographer at a white-pine table, a cuspidor, a pair of shirt sleeves,
+a black mustache, and a blacker cigar.
+
+Entering, Lilly was surprised at the measured tempo of her voice and the
+manner in which she permitted her eyebrows to arch ever so
+superciliously.
+
+"I'm looking for an engagement," she said, speaking through the ticking
+of the typewriter.
+
+The jaw ate in half an inch more of cigar and swung around in the
+swivel.
+
+"Voice?"
+
+"Yes. High soprano."
+
+He ran a swift cocked eye over her points and turned to the white-pine
+table.
+
+"Send her down to Visigoth," he said to the stenographer, who took up
+where he left off.
+
+She was as blond and as bland as a summer's day. A Pompadour dipped down
+over one eye and her jaws moved as rhythmically as rigorously to gum
+with a pull to it. She was herself caricatured. She and Lilly exchanged
+that quickest of inventories, woman's for woman.
+
+"Sign here."
+
+Lilly signed.
+
+"Ten dollars."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Our rules. Ten dollars a year bureau membership, and fifty per cent of
+first two weeks' salary."
+
+"But what if--"
+
+"We always place sooner or later."
+
+"But in case--"
+
+"Take this card down to the Union Family Theater, Union Square, and ask
+for Robert Visigoth. It's a two-a-day. If you don't do business with
+him, come back to-morrow morning."
+
+A quick dozen of questions rushed to Lilly's lips, but instead she laid
+down a new ten-dollar bill, crammed the slip into her palm through the
+hole in her glove, and went out, the snapping torrent of typewriting
+already resumed.
+
+The Union Family Theater was the first of a succession of variety houses
+that was to spread, first to Harlem, then Philadelphia, and later gird
+the country like a close-link chain. Vaudeville prefaced with
+stereopticon views, designed to appeal to the strict respectability of
+the most strictly respectable audiences in the world.
+
+The high-class Rialto houses might pander to low-class comedy and
+Broadway take its entertainment broad, but Robert Visigoth laid the
+corner stone of subsequent fortunes when he decided that a
+ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville audience that smells sour of perspiration
+and strong foods demands entertainment as pink and as sweet as a baby's
+heel, and that a gunman in the gallery will catcall his prototype on
+the stage.
+
+Let the Noras and all the pyschanalyzed Magdas go their problematic and
+not always prophylactic ways, the Visigoth Family Theaters wanted 'em
+sweet, high-necked and low-browed.
+
+Robert Visigoth, attorney-at-law, whose practice had suddenly, by one of
+those arbitrary twists as difficult to account for as the changed course
+of a river, assumed a theatrical twist, had taken over, on cleverly
+obtained backing, the Union Family Theater from an insolvent client.
+Within a year it had made a disappearing island of the law office,
+flowing over and finally submerging that enterprise in the swifter
+waters of the new.
+
+At the end of two years, Bruce Visigoth, a younger brother by ten years
+and snatched from the law the very day he graduated into it, was already
+in Chicago, launching under the auspices of The Enterprise Amusement
+Company, the People's Family Theater, Popular Prices, the sixth link of
+the chain already in the soldering.
+
+When Lilly found out the older of these brothers, he was standing in the
+black auditorium of the theater, holding an electric bulb made portable
+by a coil of cord, and directing the reverberating hammering down of an
+additional brace of three orchestra chairs for which room had been found
+by shifting the position of the bass drum.
+
+A hairy old watchdog, tilted back against the brick side of the building
+and smoking a pipe so foul that its tang clung to her hair that night as
+she brushed it out, inspected her slip of paper and led her through a
+black labyrinth of wings and properties.
+
+An aroma lay on that blackness that in some indefinable way quickened
+her, set her nostrils quivering, and ran along her entire being like a
+line of fire. It smelled of Elizabethans in buckskin. Bottom rollicked
+through it, thumb to nose. Ophelia leaned out of it. Bernhardt,
+Coquelin, Melba, intoned into it. Its cold, pink paintiness lay damply
+to her face. She had never smelled simmering mascara, but her lashes
+were hot with it. Suddenly to herself she was herself, running ahead of
+the wind, her aching senses bathed in an odor which somehow intoxicated
+them. She was on a stage for the first time in her life, a bunch light
+only half revealing it to her. Through the megaphone of cupped hands and
+the dimness of the auditorium a voice came at her.
+
+"Come down here, around through the left box."
+
+She groped her way to a steel door, stumbling down two unsuspected
+steps, and was suddenly in the carpeted silence of an aisle. Robert
+Visigoth came toward her, the electric bulb held high and dragging the
+yards of cord behind him.
+
+"I'm from the agency," she said at once, the little beating quality that
+she was feeling all over her in her voice, and holding out the slip.
+
+"Come out here," he said, "where I can see you."
+
+Some daylight flowed in through a slightly open fire exit and she
+caught at a last moment of darkness to straighten her hat.
+
+"Sing?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He shoved open the iron door so that more light flowed over her.
+
+"Why," he said, "you're a big girl, aren't you?"
+
+"I don't know," she said, through a little laugh of embarrassment, and
+noticing that, regarding her, he wetted his lips.
+
+"That part's all right. What I need is a good refined ballad voice.
+Understand? The kind that can sing 'The Suwanee River' as if the only
+thing in the world that mattered is that old plantation down there.
+Understand?"
+
+"I see."
+
+He spoke through a slight patois, New-Yorkese, but which she misjudged
+for Virginian. He was in inverse ratio to her stock idea of theatrical
+manager. Both brothers were to become more and more subject to this soft
+indictment.
+
+Born in one of those old morose houses in lower Lexington Avenue, each
+had lived there until he obtained his degree of LL.D. from a state
+university. It had been a sedate, a mildly prosperous, even an historic
+home. A Vice President of the United States had once owned it. Then a
+Major O. Higginbothom, and finally, for fifteen years of tenancy, the
+Visigoths. One of the kind whose genteel hall light had burned through
+the fanlight decade after decade, and then suddenly, overnight, as it
+were, disintegrated into a furnished-room house with a sign over the
+door bell.
+
+One evening Horace R. Visigoth, of the law firm of Visigoth, Visigoth &
+Higginbothom, did not answer his wife's soft question to him across the
+green-shaded reading lamp of their library table. His head was quite
+sunk forward in a sheaf of proofs. He was dead. One month later his wife
+failed to awaken to Pauline Visigoth's frenzied attempts or to even a
+dexterous physician's respiratory methods. The year following Pauline
+Visigoth married the dexterous physician and moved to Chicago.
+
+The Lexington Avenue house succumbed to a quick sale, and in attempting
+to divert the law business out of the clayey rut of quiet old
+conservatism, the Enterprise Amusement Company was ultimately to
+be born.
+
+Robert Visigoth, twenty-nine at the time, betrayed little of the
+heritage his name suggested. His Teutonic blood pretty well laid, he was
+a trifle too short and a trifle too heavy, and with none of his mother's
+lean patrician quality to which both his younger brother and older
+sister had fallen heir.
+
+Suggesting future rotundities and a reddishness of complexion that was
+presently to purple, at this stage his chin was undoubted and as square
+as a spade, and, as so often happens to chins of this potentiality,
+punctuated absurdly with a dimple, and he wore a little clipped edge of
+black mustache which he tried to twirl.
+
+Busy at the mannerism, if not the act, of twirling that hirsute
+adornment of upper lip, he continued to observe Lilly.
+
+"You understand? What I need is a real heart-to-heart voice."
+
+"I'm quite good at ballads."
+
+"Quite good or darn good?"
+
+"Darn."
+
+"Experience?"
+
+"I'm just in from as far west as--Dallas."
+
+"Now what I want is a turn that hasn't struck the West yet. Understand?
+It originated right here in this theater. There is a firm of music
+publishers in this town makes up slides of its songs, and all you have
+to do is stand beside the screen and sing to the stereopticon
+illustrations. Understand? You don't have to follow the pictures. The
+pictures follow you. It is sure fire if it is handled right, only the
+girl we had on last week must have wrapped her vocal cords in sandpaper.
+The secret of the whole thing is to make them--out there--live the song.
+Understand?"
+
+"I see."
+
+"Every woman in the audience has to be the sweetheart and every man the
+lover you are singing to them about. And to do that the first one to
+live that song must be you. Believe in yourself before you expect the
+world to. If you come in here and tell me you sing _quite_ good, it
+won't be easy to convince me of more if you begin to warble like Melba.
+Now you go up there and let me hear a bar or two. Take care of the last
+row gallery and the first row orchestra will take care of
+itself. Shoot!"
+
+"I--haven't my music with me--my repertoire--"
+
+"Nonsense! Just a bar or two--'Suwanee River'--anything with heart in
+it. Give us some lights up there, Bob."
+
+Through the blackness Lilly moved as if she were sleep-walking in it.
+Little needles of nervousness were out all over her, and, absurdly
+enough, there walked across her vision the utterly irrelevant spectacle
+of old black Willie with her feet bound in gunny sacks and the pencil
+nubs in her hair, and just as irrelevantly her mind began to pop with a
+little explosive ejaculative prayer: "O God, make him take me! O God,
+make him take me!"
+
+The bunch light had been dragged down center stage. She stood beside it,
+opening her mouth as if to muster voice, then closing it. It was as if
+water were swirling around and around her, the unseen presence in the
+back of the house surging at her like a multitude.
+
+"Shoot!"
+
+She looked appealingly in the direction of the hammering down of the
+seats.
+
+"Never mind that. Sing to the top row of the gallery."
+
+A fearful recurrence of yesterday's train-sickness rushed over her; she
+could have crumpled to her knees, had even a sense of wanting to faint,
+but instead she opened her lips again, her eyes fixed on the unseen last
+two tows of the unseen top gallery, and by miracle finding a pitch that
+left her plenty of range.
+
+     "Way down upon the Suwanee River-"
+
+"Louder!"
+
+     "Far, far away,
+     There's where my heart is turning ever,
+     There's where the old folks stay.
+     All the world am sad and dreary,
+     Everywhere I roam.
+     Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary--"
+
+The lay of Page Avenue was before her, swollen through tears. Her mother
+sewing beside Katy Stutz. The patient back of her father's gray head.
+Her parents on their knees, far back there somewhere beside her bed of
+fever. Albert! Their wedding night when the door had closed behind
+them! "O God, make him take me! Please!
+
+     "Far from the o-old folks--at ho--"
+
+"That will do."
+
+She stood with her mouth an O on the unfinished note, hand to the little
+rise of her bosom.
+
+"Meet me around in my office back stage." His voice was like a call in a
+fog, retreating and retreating. She followed it. They met in a narrow
+patch of broad daylight.
+
+"I'm afraid," she began, her voice breaking on a gulp--"I'm afraid I
+didn't--"
+
+"You did very well," he said, kindly. "Little off key and your voice
+won't set the world on fire, and it has a tremolo quality that may be
+rotten-bad singing, but it's the right stuff for the act."
+
+She thought, with a swoop of perception, that in this she discerned the
+astuteness of a buyer too clever to praise the article he covets. She
+felt lighter, as if some of her had melted in the ordeal. The machinery
+of her body began to take up again, the saliva to flow, and her heart to
+beat without seeming to hit its walls.
+
+"I'll try you out for a week. Twenty dollars?"
+
+"Yes." Trying to seem to pro and con.
+
+"Come to-morrow at ten and I'll have a man down to go over next week's
+slides with you. That gives you until Monday. Something pink on the
+order of what you are wearing will do, only fluffier. Rough up your hair
+a bit, too. No, leave it slick like that, but something fluffy in a hat
+or a sun-bonnet with a pink bow under the chin. Right there--under that
+little chin."
+
+Her head flew up from his touch.
+
+"I see."
+
+"Manage it?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"You what?"
+
+"I know so."
+
+"Good. Never let a think show through your answer. Yes or no!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He tweaked her chin again.
+
+"Watch out somebody doesn't steal you on your way home, big girl."
+
+"To-morrow at ten," she repeated, going out into the sunshine that smote
+her with the sting of hot lances. The tweak from his hand lay back
+somewhere, branded none too pleasantly into her consciousness.
+
+But just the same, when she inquired of a traffic policeman the
+direction to the Hotel Hudson, even the mundane wording of her asking
+clicked like happy castanets into her spirit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+And so it came about, through events of surprisingly simple shaping,
+that her first week in the metropolis found Lilly integral to it.
+
+She liked the consciousness that unless she appeared at the Union Family
+Theater at two-fifteen and at eight-fifteen she was breaking into the
+continuity of a sequence of events in which she had her place.
+
+She was already in the rush of assurance that followed her sense of
+earning capacity, regarding the Union Family Theater merely as a means
+to an end, and in spare time had registered at two concert bureaus, read
+off the same building of plate-glass windows, and had purchased the
+score of "Carmen," humming Michaela's aria, in bed of mornings. There
+was a letter she had once obtained from Max Rinehardt, addressed:
+
+"_To Whom It May Concern. Miss Lilly Becker has studied with me for a
+period of three years. I consider her voice a lyric soprano of fine
+quality._"
+
+Evidently it concerned no one. The clerk at the concert bureau tossed it
+aside without comment. Visigoth, when he read it one day in the wings,
+returned it in just that manner.
+
+She was secretly ashamed of her professional debut in a role that would
+not have survived the ridicule of even Flora Bankhead's easy standards.
+Many a time, together at matinees, they had giggled and munched
+chocolates over acts that hardly rivaled hers for sentimental appeal of
+about one dimension. Plenty of length and no depth.
+
+To a series of colored views thrown upon the screen, Lilly sang from a
+dark stage into the warm musk and stale linen-smelling theater, a ballad
+as slow and sweet as taffy in the pulling.
+
+     "Dressed up in her gingham gown,
+      Just to come with me to town.
+      How the sun was shining down!
+      It seemed to bless our lit-tul wedding day."
+
+                      CHORUS:
+
+     "Darling Sue--e dear,
+      How I miss your laughing!
+      Seems to me I hear it in the same old way.
+      Darling Sue dear, don't believe I'm chaffing.
+      Bless your heart! I love you in the same old way."
+
+Lights! Revealing Lilly in the pink mull and dangling sunbonnet beside
+the blank white screen. They liked her, invariably demanding encore,
+this time the words and score of the chorus thrown upon the screen and,
+to Lilly's importunings and pretty encouragement, the house joining in.
+
+By arrangement with the publishing house, this exploitation of song hits
+cost the Visigoth brothers nothing. In fact the little novelty soon came
+to supplement one of the eight acts on the program, thus eliminating
+a number.
+
+Each week a new song score bordered in hearts and flowers was thrown
+upon that darkness, the audience eager to find a hum in it.
+
+Lilly's second song, "Mamma, Why Are You So Sad To-night?" went even
+better than the first, and it so pleased Robert Visigoth, who in those
+years had his ears to the ground of the daily audience, to hear them
+filing out, whistling and carrying it on little tra-la-las, that he
+called Lilly into his office the first day of the second week, to
+announce a five-dollar raise in salary.
+
+She had been in the habit of oozing past him rather hurriedly in and out
+the dark passages, conscious that his touch was ever ready to slide down
+her length of arm, or his knee to find out hers and press it if he sat
+down beside her as she waited in the wings.
+
+It was before the realty aspect, the buying, leasing, and selling, of
+theater property had engulfed him, and his presence around the theater,
+often shirt-sleeved, was hardly a matter of moment.
+
+However favorably he differed in aspect from Lilly's preconception of
+the managerial genius, her inhibitions concerning him were strong. She
+always sat on the edge of her chair in his presence. To accept so much
+as a slip of paper from him meant that his touch would trail to the last
+long-drawn second. His eyes had a habit of focusing, seeming to move in
+a bit toward the tip of his nose and grill intimately into her being.
+And then his wetted lips, as if his mouth were watering.
+
+"You need to be waked up," he said once to her. "You're like a great big
+sleepy cat."
+
+She jerked away from his touch and his reference, hurrying from the
+theater, as always, immediately after her act, which came first on the
+afternoon and evening bill. Secretly she was thoroughly ashamed of what
+she was doing, putting each performance quickly behind her.
+
+Six hundred and twenty-two dollars still lay in the chamois bag against
+her bosom, but the additional five dollars a week on to her salary was a
+saving prop against the not infrequent sag of her spirit.
+
+She was listed at half a dozen agencies, but nothing presented itself.
+Her first hotel bill, twenty-eight dollars, sent her scurrying, against
+further and deeper inroads into the chamois bag, to an immediately
+adjoining side street of brownstone fronts as without identity as a row
+of soldiers, all of them proclaiming the furnished room to that great
+sandstorm of New York transients who blow in and out of them in
+nameless whirl.
+
+Their dreariness flowed over her in cold, soupy odors, that left a
+feeling of a coating of grease over the surface of her. The poor filbert
+of gaslight burning into floor after floor of slits of hallway. The
+climb after a whole processional of spotty landladies whose shortness of
+breath contributed to the odor-laden air.
+
+The room which she finally obtained at three dollars a week was a
+third-floor front, shaped like a shoe box, with an aisle of walking
+space between the cot and washstand, and as dank to her and as
+shiver-inducing as a damp bathing suit donned at dawn.
+
+But the matting on the floor smelled scrubbed, the bathroom at the head
+of the stairs contained a porcelain tub instead of the usual horror in
+painted tin, and except for June bugs that bumbled all night against her
+ceiling, attracted by the incandescence from the theater sign across the
+street, was free from those scavengers of bed slats and woodwork which,
+often as she inspected from room to room, to her agonized flush, had
+crawled across a landlady's very denial of them.
+
+Robert Visigoth had a habit of appraising this ready blush of hers. It
+never rushed hotly to her face but what he noted it in persiflage.
+
+"Look at her blush!" he cried, one afternoon as they both stooped to
+recover her dropped hand bag, their heads bumping so that they sprang
+apart in laughter.
+
+"The idea, Mr. Visigoth! I'm not blushing!" she cried, stinging with her
+inability to control the too ready red.
+
+He ran his hand over the smooth glaze of her hair.
+
+"Don't!"
+
+"Let's see if it will muss. I'll wager it's painted on."
+
+"It grows that way," she said, levelly.
+
+"I like it! Clean as a whistle. Interesting. In fact, you're a mighty
+interesting young woman, if you want to know it, Miss Luella Parlow."
+
+"What is the song for next week, Mr. Visigoth?"
+
+"'My Pretty, My Pretty,'" he said, his intimate eyes watching her
+wriggle, with a sense of being ridiculous, on the hook of his glance.
+
+"I never know how to take you," she flared, infuriated, and rushed
+toward the door.
+
+"Take me--with you."
+
+"Really now--this--this is too absurd."
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"Home, of course. I have all this time to myself between now and the
+evening performance. Why waste it sitting around with the dog and
+trapeze acts?"
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+"West Forty-fourth Street, near Eighth."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"West Forty-fourth Street."
+
+"Hm-m-m!" he said, with a new easiness of manner that alarmed her.
+
+"Selfish little girl. All this time to yourself."
+
+"You would be surprised how it flies."
+
+"What do you do?"
+
+"Oh, no end of odds and ends. Wash out things. Read. Sew. Practice.
+Write."
+
+"What do you write? Letters to suitors? Lucky chaps."
+
+"Nonsense!" she said, coloring.
+
+"A girl like you must have a string of them after her."
+
+"No! I write--you see, I've always sort of wanted to write fiction.
+Magazine stories. I like to scribble in my spare time."
+
+"Story writing? You can't serve two masters in this profession."
+
+"Oh, and then I practice." It was here she had shown him the letter
+addressed, "To Whom It May Concern." "I haven't a piano, but you would
+be surprised how helpful it is just to memorize the role from
+the score."
+
+"What role?"
+
+"I know four. Michaela is my last. I haven't memorized all of her aria
+yet, but half the time I'm singing her with my mind, if you know what I
+mean. I once had twelve lessons on Marguerite. With study, Mr. Visigoth,
+and perhaps some more lessons with one of the big teachers here, do you
+think I have the slightest chance for opera or--concert? You can be
+frank with me. Do you?"
+
+He patted her.
+
+"Too much ambition will make that satiny head of yours ache."
+
+"Let it ache."
+
+"What you need more than lessons is some one to wake you up. That will
+do more for you than all the training money can buy. You need a
+rousing-good love affair. Love, that's the secret!"
+
+She walked past him now, swinging open the stage door.
+
+"You can be so nice, Mr. Visigoth, and so--horrid."
+
+He followed, laughing.
+
+"I'll walk a ways. Which way you going?"
+
+"Home."
+
+They strolled into the syrupy warmth of a late Indian-summer afternoon.
+At each crossing he took her arm, closing gently into the flesh.
+
+"Yes, my little lady, that's what you need."
+
+"What?"
+
+"To be waked up."
+
+"Oh, there you go again! Is there no limit to sex self-consciousness? I
+want to be a person in my work. An individual. Not first and foremost
+a woman!"
+
+"Why, my dear girl, you talk like a child! Sex is the very soul of art.
+The greatest songs have been sung and the greatest pictures painted
+because men and women have loved. Don't tell me a great big handsome
+creature like you doesn't realize that!"
+
+"Well, just the same," with feminine subjectiveness, "I mean to make my
+way as an individual first and a woman second. I give nothing to you men
+and I ask nothing except a fighting chance. I don't believe in all this
+pay-the-price business. I don't recognize you as the arbiters of my
+destiny. I'll pay my price with my ability, and if I can't pay up that
+way then I deserve to fail. Women can fight back at the world with
+something besides their sex. I intend to prove it."
+
+He closed tighter over her arm.
+
+"I like you when you tilt at windmills, Miss Don Quixote, and I like the
+way your eyes turn black."
+
+"There you are at it again."
+
+"Certainly; it's the law of life."
+
+"You mean it's the law of men! Why should you set the price of our
+success? We women are going to batter down the monopoly."
+
+"You're a regular little holy terror for woman's rights. Come in here
+for a drink and tell me about it."
+
+They were approaching the rapids of Broadway, the quickened torrent of
+the pleasure zone that leaps high in folly even under sunlight. Sidewalk
+humanity quickened and had a shove to it. Street cars and cabs plunged
+in seemingly impassable directions. Frivolity was showing her naked
+shoulder on lithograph roof garden and matinee stage. The Times Building
+stood like a colossus, breakwater to the tide. Rector's invited.
+
+"Come in for a drink," he repeated.
+
+She threw him a northwest glance with what for her amounted to quite an
+adventure in coquetry.
+
+"Aha!" in the key of burlesque. "Either I sully these fair lips with
+alcohol or to-morrow I awake jobless."
+
+He was visibly annoyed, dropping her arm and hurrying past the mirrored
+entrance.
+
+"You flatter yourself."
+
+She bit into her lips, again with a sense of her ridiculousness,
+confessing, in her stress and against the old inhibition, to a state of
+being unwell.
+
+"It isn't that, and you know it! I'm done up these last few days.
+Feeling seedy. It must be this Indian-summerish heat."
+
+"Poor pussy!" he said, again good-humored.
+
+It was true that a recurring sense of dizziness would sweep like a
+sudden wave over her, in street cars, even in bed before she rose
+mornings, and that very afternoon as she sang into the murky darkness a
+terrifying sense of it had threatened her.
+
+In the little restaurant in Union Square which she frequented, her
+healthy young appetite would prompt her to order foods that when they
+arrived she would suddenly reject. She tried to guard against these
+nervous recurrences by resolutely permitting no thought of her
+yesterdays to crop into her to-days. Except, daily, she visited the
+Public Library, reading over St. Louis newspapers of last week's
+vintage, and never failing to glance at the death notices. For one week
+an advertisement under PERSONAL appeared, which every time she
+encountered it was sure to blur over her vision with quick tears:
+
+     Lilly, come home. All is forgiven.
+
+She attributed some of her nervousness to the condition of mind this
+little paragraph invariably induced. To bear out this conviction she
+even omitted the visits to the Library for three or four days, but still
+the flashes of discomfort persisted.
+
+They had stopped at the stoop of her lean-looking rooming house.
+
+"So this is where you live," he said, half a smile out and his lids well
+down.
+
+"Yes," she said, unconsciously defiant, "and for my purpose it's fine."
+
+"No doubt."
+
+"Clean, quiet, and reasonable."
+
+"I see," he said through the same smile that was somehow hateful to her,
+and after a moment of apparent indecision raised his hat and walked off.
+
+The following evening, without waiting for the second refrain of chorus
+or the lights to flash up, and creating some confusion down in the
+orchestra, Lilly left the stage rather hurriedly, her hand groping ahead
+of her as if to ward off muzziness, and her very first step into the
+wings crumpled up quietly in a faint.
+
+She awoke in her little damp dungeon of a dressing room, a trick bicycle
+rider in sateen knickerbockers fanning her with a spangled jockey cap
+and immediately rushing off for her act, Robert Visigoth standing and
+looking down at her.
+
+Embarrassment flooded her. She insisted upon standing immediately,
+smoothing herself down and brushing at the wet spots where the water had
+trickled away from her lips.
+
+"Why," she said, through a gasp of apology, "of all things! Why, I have
+never done such a thing in my life! It was the heat. Oh, how silly of
+me! How unutterably silly!"
+
+He pressed her down into a chair.
+
+"You had better sit quiet there, my young miss, and get yourself
+together. One eighth of an inch nearer that bicycle trapeze in the wings
+and that smooth head of yours might not be so smooth right now."
+
+"I'm so ashamed."
+
+"I'll call a cab and take you home."
+
+"I'd rather you didn't trouble."
+
+"But I'd rather I did."
+
+She smiled through an impulse to dig her nails into her palms and weep
+her sense of ignominy.
+
+While he procured the cab she hurriedly changed from the pink into the
+coffee-colored linen, and, frightened at her pallor with the rouge
+removed, tried to pinch her cheeks back to pinkness.
+
+In the hansom and behind the wooden apron his hand crept over to hers,
+soothing it.
+
+"Poor little sick girl!" he said.
+
+She tried to withdraw, but the black spots were swimming before her, and
+to save herself from their engulfing her, as the shields and bracelets
+must have buried Tarpeia, sat suddenly erect, blinking and shaking
+her head.
+
+"Oh, I say now!"
+
+"Why, I--I'm all right--"
+
+His one arm was at her waist and with the other he was poking open the
+little trap door.
+
+"Stop at the corner."
+
+"No--please."
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+She closed her eyes, and almost immediately they drew up at a corner
+drug store adjoining a long row of brownstone fronts deep in brown
+studies. He helped her down, reading up at one of them. Dr. Barney Lee.
+"He leaves his name at the box office once in a while. Suppose you stop
+in here instead of the drug store. Don't like the idea of soda-fountain
+cures. You've a little sunstroke, I think."
+
+"No, no, Mr. Visigoth. Why, I've hardly ever had a doctor in my life!
+The--drug store will--"
+
+"One, two, three--march!"
+
+"Please!"
+
+"March! Got money? Good! I'll have a smoke in the cab. If he's not in,
+then I'll drive you around to our house doctor."
+
+He was in. But for ten minutes she sat in a leather-and-oak waiting
+room, beneath a fly-specked Rembrandt's "Night-Watch," a clock ticking
+spang into the gaslighted silence and the very chairs seeming to
+meditate as they stood.
+
+Then a pair of black-walnut doors slid back, and on a puff of iodoform
+Lilly passed between them and they clicked shut again.
+
+When she emerged Robert Visigoth's cigar was smoked two thirds its
+length and he was slumped down, with one knee hooked comfortably about
+the other.
+
+He sprang out to help her in.
+
+"Well?"
+
+Her smile was drawn across her face almost like a gash.
+
+"Tired waiting?" she said, holding her lips lifted.
+
+"Fix you up?"
+
+"You were right. A little sunstroke. A good night's rest will fix me
+up."
+
+"You've been playing 'possum."
+
+"That's it," she said, with the plating of hired gayety over her tones,
+but her nails printing little half moons into her palms.
+
+"Just for punishment, I'm going to drive you around the Park."
+
+"No, no, no! I don't feel quite up to it. He said rest--a good night's
+rest."
+
+He regarded her unmistakable pallor.
+
+"Oh, all right," sulkily, "you tantalizing enigma, you! Gad! you--you'd
+drive a man crazy! There's something over your face. A veil. I'd like to
+tear it off--"
+
+"You--you're talking like a Third Avenue melodrama."
+
+"I suppose I am," he said, subsiding and regarding the hooked top of his
+cane the remaining ten minutes of the drive. "I suppose I am."
+
+He dismissed the cab at her curb. To escape his arm she even ran up the
+steps, and to prove how complete recovery called down over one shoulder:
+
+"You've been kind and I'm grateful. Good night."
+
+"Prove it," he said, up and after her, his arm at her waist.
+
+"What?" she said, his meaning flashing as she spoke. She was crowding
+away from his nearness against one of the storm doors which folded back
+against the entrance, sooty light filtering over them through a frosted
+door panel.
+
+His face twisted out of repose, flooded darker and darker with red.
+
+"You devil," he said, "you knew you'd get me."
+
+"You go!" she cried, her lips pulled with the degradation of the moment.
+
+He grasped her so that the breath jumped out of her.
+
+"Oh," she cried, wrenching herself free, "don't you dare put your foot
+in this house--"
+
+"Then the Gramatan, Lilly. It's quiet and first class there--we can have
+a talk. I'll call a cab--the Gramatan. Or my place--I live alone."
+
+"If you do I--I'll bite! I'll bite, you hear?"
+
+"Do it," he said, his face the color that was Iago's, grasping her then
+in the shadow of the storm door, and kissing her so on the open lips
+that to evade him she had to wriggle down to her knees and out of
+his clasp.
+
+The shamefulness of the scene not to be endured, she held her hand with
+the key in it behind her back; then suddenly let it fly up for
+her hatpin.
+
+"If you come near me--"
+
+He stood back from her upflung arm, his refinement of feature
+incongruous under the rush of ox-blood red, his teeth showing whiter as
+he darkened.
+
+"What the devil do you want, then? You devil! Who are you? There's only
+one woman in a thousand I'd follow to a joint like this. I'm afraid of
+them. Now I've had enough of this baby talk from you. It doesn't match
+this house! What's your game? Let me up."
+
+"House!"
+
+"What do you expect, with an address like this? There's two kinds of
+women. You can't be the kind you pretend to be and live here. What is
+the comedy? I like you, Lilly. Let me up. Come, put that little arm
+down. God damn it! what do you want?"
+
+With a wrench that threw him backward, a frenzied instant of struggle
+for the lock, and she was in, slamming the door behind her, and up the
+two flights with such a sense of pursuit that her breath turned to moans
+in her throat.
+
+Once within her room, locking her door on its very slam, and her hat
+sliding down on her unpinned hair, she dropped down on her bed edge so
+that the springs coughed, seeming to bleed her tears, so roundly and
+full of agony they came.
+
+The white light from the electric sign opposite created a pallor in the
+room that enveloped her like a veil. She rocked herself as she sat. She
+pressed her palms into her eyes until the terrible kind of darkness they
+induced was sprinkled with red. She clapped her hands to her mouth to
+keep down the rise of shrieks. She burrowed her head down into her
+pillow, beating into the surrounding area of bed, chewing at the sheet
+end, twisting it until it became rigid. She slid to the floor as if for
+relief of its hardness; sat looking into the white kind of darkness with
+the rims of her eyes stretched until her gaze seemed to sleep. She fell
+to rocking herself again and twisting the sheet in an outrageous
+abandonment of despair that was abashing because it was so naked. Her
+hands wound each other in a dry wash. She sobbed in long coughs drawn
+through a resisting throat. Pounded the matting. Dragged her palms down
+over her face, pulling the hair with it.
+
+Half the night through she paced the narrow aisle of the room, repeating
+and repeating until the darkness seemed filled with the rushing of a
+million frantic little wings:
+
+"O God! O God! Help me, God! Make it a lie! Tell me that the doctor
+lied! God, I need you! Where are you? Save me! Where are you? Help me,
+God! Help me!"
+
+Thus did Lilly Penny greet the coming of her child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+There was no egress for Lilly's state of panic. It hurled itself into
+this and that _cul-de-sac_, only to dash into a black, a colossal wall
+of ignorance builded on the sands of false and revolting modesty, and
+which, as it tottered, threatened to crush her.
+
+Her mind ran hither and thither, panic and anger plunging into storm
+waves of sobs. Around and around spun her terror in its trap. Each pore
+of her body might have been a mouth screaming. Distaste for her physical
+awareness mounted upon her old peculiar aversion. The maternal did not
+even lift its head. She could have beaten her own head, and did, for the
+relief of pain. One alternative after another flickered into her
+consciousness, only to die out again into blackness. Home! But by the
+merest flash of the incongruous, not to say absurd, vision of Albert
+Penny's wilted collar on the chiffonier, or his shirt sleeves that were
+held back with pink rubber garters, bending over the recalcitrant bed
+caster, knew how impossible that!
+
+Forceps sensitive enough to lay hold of an antenna could not capture the
+vagariousness of all of this, but none the less it was just that
+ridiculous and irrelevant flash across her vision that eliminated the
+almost unbearable tugging of nostalgia at her heart strings.
+
+There were long hours of dizzying and fascinated contemplation down into
+the cypress-sided vale of self-destruction; that ravine which gets its
+glance from most and even the best of us. It seemed to her that she
+could not even think for the rush of its dark waters pressing against
+her reason; but love of life was strongest of all in Lilly. It was the
+sweep of her own vitality which she felt pressing.
+
+She tried to desire what had befallen her, to think in terms of beauty;
+to feel the miracle of her state and the age-old throbs that make
+maternity sublime. The sense of her aversion debased while it immersed
+her. She reasoned how valiantly whole eternities of women had gone down
+to meet motherhood and how proudly those eternities of women had worn
+the moment. Her mother. Mrs. Kemble. The concept awed her, but then
+memory came scourging out of that long night of her childhood:
+
+MRS. KEMBLE: "Kill me, God! Put me out of it! Please! I can't suffer any
+more! Kill me, God!"
+
+She buried her head into her pillow; tried to think in terms of God; to
+intimidate her rebellion. Finally she did cool to a sort of leaden
+despair through which slow determination began to percolate.
+
+At nine o'clock the following morning, a Sunday that wrapped the city
+windily in the first cold gray of autumn, without having undressed the
+night through, she ventured as far as Times Square for a newspaper, the
+dark halls of the house and the rows of closed doors suddenly sinister.
+The wind caught at her flimsy skirts, blowing them forward, and she was
+forced to clutch the wide brim of her hat. Summer was gone.
+
+But more than that, it seemed to Lilly that a black gauze lay across her
+eyes, the very complexion of the streets had darkened, the hurried
+wind-blown clouds stamping the whole aspect of things with turbulence.
+She could not keep the run out of her steps, and her palms were full of
+the half moons impressed there by her finger nails. The city, as joyous
+as Chloe, had suddenly turned a frightening grimace upon her.
+
+She bought a Sunday paper, letting the prankish gale around Times Square
+scurry the bulk of it through the streets while she stood in the shelter
+of the news stand, unfolding the Furnished Room section. Wind puffed the
+sheets up into her face, and finally she crossed to a white-tiled lunch
+room, ordering coffee and rolls more for the temporary shelter than for
+appetite. Scanning column after column, occasionally she poked a
+toothpick through the page, and once tore out a little segment, dropping
+it into her hand bag. It read:
+
+Neatly Furnished Room near Columbia University and Kroeg School of
+Music. Three dollars and a half a week and breakfasts if desired. Ideal
+for refined young lady. Inquire at 9000 Amsterdam Avenue.
+
+She paid her check, inquired direction of the cashier, and, hurrying
+out, boarded a north-bound Amsterdam Avenue car, riding for half an hour
+through streets lined in petty shops and presenting the peculiar swept
+look of Sunday.
+
+She had cooled to apathy, a drowsiness descending that made her
+reluctant to leave the car; could have ridden on and on in this eased
+and half-narcotized state, but people had a habit of remembering her. A
+truckman had followed her only the day before through half a block of
+snarled traffic to see that she turned properly to the right. New York,
+mad as a March hare, was eager to direct her. The conductor now walked
+up the aisle of car to tap her on the shoulder.
+
+"Your corner, miss."
+
+Nine thousand Amsterdam Avenue was a drug store sidled in between a
+bakeshop that six days a week poured forth sweet hot breath, and an
+undertaking establishment with a white-satin infant's coffin _de luxe_
+tilted in the window. The sight of it caught Lilly like a pain. That
+peculiar power of an obsessed mind to see in everything its own state
+reflected had set in. Queer that this infant's coffin should tilt at
+her. A bouncing youngster leaned out of its perambulator to dance
+its arms.
+
+She hurried into the drug store. Isaac Neugass, Chemist.
+
+It was the older-style pharmacy, with a gilt mortar and pestle for a
+sign; and as she entered, a bell attached by a pulley rang somewhere in
+a thin, tattling voice. The soda fountain, fountain pen, the picture
+postcard, the umbrella, and the face-powder demonstrator had not yet
+invaded here. Isaac Neugass, Chemist--was just that. His walls were
+lined in labeled jars of panacea. The pungency of valerianate of ammonia
+smote the entrant. He pummeled his own pills, percolated his own
+paregoric, prescribed for neighborhood miseries from an invariable
+bottle that was slow, sluggish, and malodorous in the pouring, anointed
+the neighborhood bruises, and extracted, always gratis, neighborhood
+cinders from neighborhood eyes.
+
+A Madison Avenue physician, erstwhile of Amsterdam Avenue, and more
+recently of two honorary degrees, his own private hospital, two outer
+waiting rooms, three assistants, and four-figure operations, still
+diverted quite a runnel of his clientele to the impeccable pharmaceutics
+of the little Amsterdam Avenue shop, so that the motor car and the
+carriage not infrequently sidled up to its curb.
+
+At Lilly's entrance, Isaac Neugass came shuffling around the
+ground-glass prescription partition, his hands at their perpetual dry
+washing of each other. There was something of a dressed-up wishbone
+about him, in the way his clothing scarcely suggested the thin body
+within them. They had scarcely a point of contact, even with his angles.
+He was a mere inner tubing to what he wore. A skull cap hid his
+baldness, a fringe of gray below it suggesting what was not beneath it.
+His little eyes were like steel, humorously glinting gimlets in the
+process of boring, the old face wrinkling up around them as pliantly as
+a dough eraser. In fact, when he laughed his little chin with the tip of
+beard did curl up like one of those rubber-toy faces where chin
+kicks brow.
+
+"Well," he said, with a great dip of nose down into his smile, "whad can
+I do for you?" He reminded Lilly of a great auk, something alcidine in
+the thin cheeks with the mouth cutting so widely toward the ears.
+
+She had not realized it, but suddenly the terrible, the impersonal
+detachment of the past weeks smote her. There had been voiceless days
+and days when the sound of herself asking direction or ordering from a
+bill of fare had an element of surprise in it, and the toneless voice of
+public service was the only one directed to her: "Step lively." "Two
+blocks east." "Don't mention it." "No more rice pudding left, ma'am."
+
+When Isaac Neugass said, "Well, whad can I do for you?" something within
+her thawed so that she could have cried.
+
+"I'm looking for this furnished room," she said, and held out the slip
+toward him.
+
+"You wand my wife," he said, waving her the direction. "Go right
+outside to the next stoop and ring the bell over Neugass."
+
+"Oh, thank you!" she said, suiting her action to his word.
+
+"It's a nize room. I could wish it to an early bird to catch it."
+
+"That's what I want, a nice, quiet room."
+
+"Then you got it," he cried. "It's a room for a needle," his thumb and
+forefinger indicating an infinitesibly fine point.
+
+"A needle?"
+
+"So it could hear itself fall."
+
+In his own way Mr. Neugass was a jokester, insisting upon the laugh,
+sitting back upon his figurative haunches, waiting.
+
+"Then it is just what I want," said Lilly, giving him his smile, "only I
+hope it isn't too--"
+
+He took to waggling his head, his little kindly eyes illuminated with a
+sunburst of wrinkles and his voice a festooned chant of rising and
+falling inflections.
+
+"Sa-y, if you can't pay three-fifty, she'll make it three. You doan'
+need to tell her I told you, but for such a young lady like you, sa-y,
+the brice in the newspaper doan' always got to be the brice in the hand,
+ain't it?"
+
+She laughed, the irises that had crowded out the gray in her eyes
+suddenly smaller and back to normal.
+
+In the little entrance adjoining, with its line-up of door bells, she
+pressed the button as directed. A clicking answered her ring, and she
+had to learn from a child who entered with a dangling pail of milk, that
+she was to speak upward through a tube above the bell.
+
+"About the room?" Yes, she was to come up.
+
+She climbed two flights of dark, clean-smelling stairs, and Mrs.
+Neugass herself opened the door.
+
+Mary, Rispah, Cornelia, Monica, Martha Washington, Mrs. Whistler,
+Margaret Ogilvy, and Mrs. Neugass, blessed be their tribe, must all have
+had about the same look about the eyes. Masha Neugass was sixty, and
+looked it. A blue-gingham apron held her in at the waist so that she
+bulged softly and fatly above and below it.
+
+Thirty minutes and one hundred years removed from Millionaires' Row, the
+apartment was just another of those paradoxes which the city can shake
+from its spangled sleeve. Built like a coach, each room opening off a
+strip of hallway, it was a scoured chromo of Victoria's age of horrors.
+The brilliantly flower-splashed wall paper and carpeting. A front room
+that smelled and pricked of horsehair. The little patch of dining room
+brightened by a red tablecloth, two canaries, and a window-sill array of
+turnips sprouting in bottles. The rush of bead portieres as you walked
+through them. Hassocks. A freshly washed-and-ironed ribbon bow on a
+chair back. Pillow shams. Nottingham-lace curtains with sham drapes
+woven into them. A pair of bisque pugs.
+
+The room to let was the size of a freight elevator and crammed with a
+fine old walnut bed when there was scarcely room for a cot. Also an
+overflow of curlicue divan, and a washstand. It was clean to coolness,
+as if the very air were washed, but, entering it, Mrs. Neugass flecked
+an imaginary dust particle from the divan with her apron, then wrapping
+it muff fashion about her hands.
+
+"It ain't big, but it's gumfortable."
+
+"Indeed it is!" said Lilly, sniffing in appreciatively.
+
+"We doan' got to rent this room, miss. It's our first time. My husband,
+if he had his way, wouldn't. But I say it's a shame for the waste, since
+our youngest daughter ain't in it no more...."
+
+"It's lovely."
+
+"You see out there between those two chimneys? That's Columbia
+University. You're from the college? Yes? We brefer it should be
+a student."
+
+"I--I'm a high-school graduate, but not exactly a college student. I
+mean--I'm a music student. Voice."
+
+"You doan' tell me! Now ain't that a coinstidance! For why you think I
+should have this room empty if not my own baby daughter is in Europe
+with her voice! For three years already, with her gone, miss, and my
+husband's daughter down to her bookkeeping all day, as I tell him, it's
+like my heart will burst from the silence."
+
+"There is something I had better explain--"
+
+"I want a young girl in the house again, I tell him."
+
+Standing there, the words pressing for utterance against her very teeth,
+Lilly swallowed them back again.
+
+"I see," she said, smiling her misery. "Then I'm afraid--I--"
+
+"We're used to a young girl. You read maybe of our daughter only in last
+Sunday's papers. Millie du Gass, with the Milan Opera?"
+
+Lilly had. "Millie du Gass--your daughter!"
+
+"We got more only last night from her in 'Traviata.' They pulled her
+carriage after the opera. Felix Auchinloss went special from Vienna to
+conduct her. That's her picture there and there and there. Say, ain't
+that a coinstidance you should be a voice!"
+
+Lilly stood regarding one of the framed photographs. A lifted young
+profile, ever so slightly of the father's aquilinity, a vocal-looking
+swell to the bosom, and a chin that locked up prettily to the
+protuberant upper lip.
+
+Regarding her, such a nausea of bitterness flowed over Lilly that her
+lips were too wry to speak and she could have sobbed out her plight to
+the simple soul there, with her hands in the muff of her apron, and her
+gaze soft to tears upon the photograph.
+
+"That ain't so good of her, miss, as some her papa keeps down in the
+store. In Milan they call her the American Beauty. Auchinloss won't
+conduct 'Faust' without our Millie's Marguerite. How she used to
+practice it, miss, righd on that piano you seen in the front room. It's
+worth all the sacrifices we made for such a success like hers. I doan'
+know who you study with, but if you come to us here, I wand once you
+should let her old teacher, Ballman, hear you. He's the man that can
+find your voice if you got it."
+
+"Oh, I do want to come here, Mrs. Neugass. I--If only--. Will you--will
+you let me talk to you as I would to my own mother? I--somehow--I--I
+think you will understand--"
+
+Then Mrs. Neugass came closer, a little whisper of garlic in her breath
+and her eyes screwed to conniving.
+
+"Sa-y, miss, you doan' need to worry. Doan' tell it to my husband that
+the reduction came from me, but if three dollars is all you can pay,
+since it's for some one who will use the piano and liven up things a
+little, it's worth the difference to me in pleasure."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Neugass, if you knew what a place like this would mean to
+me--now! If only you--"
+
+"All righd, then, for a few cents we doan' dicker. Say we make it three
+dollars, and on rainy mornings coffee and rolls so you doan' get your
+feet wet."
+
+"But I--"
+
+"We're blain beoble, miss, but we got a respegtable standing in the
+neighborhood for fifteen years. My husband's daughter by his first
+marriage is sixteen years bookkeeper down by Aaron Schmoll Paper Box
+Company in Green Street. We doan' got to rent, miss, unless it should be
+to the righd person. A nice young lady like you--"
+
+"But what if I were to tell you, Mrs. Neugass, that I'm a mar--"
+
+"You got references? It ain't I don't trust, but business is business,
+ain't it?"
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't. You see, I'm a stranger. Here from--the West to
+study. I don't quite like it where I am. In fact, I want to get
+out to-day."
+
+"Say, doan' I know how things can happen? For two months after she
+arrived in Munich, where she went first, my Millie used to write home,
+'Mamma, I can't get myself settled righd.' In one place bugs and in
+another they complained of her practicing. I got sympathy for a girl
+trying to get settled. You can come righd away up into a room of mine,
+miss. There's no extra cleaning to be done."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Neugass, if I may! I've only my valise and suitcase."
+
+A complete shrugging of Mrs. Neugass took place, her voice, brow, and
+manner lifting.
+
+"Valise and suitcase. Is that a baggage?"
+
+"I'm sending West for my trunks later, Mrs. Neugass."
+
+"You'm _Goyem_, not?"
+
+"Beg pardon?"
+
+"You're Gentiles, ain't it? Well, with _Goyem_ such things ain't so
+important. I'll show you sometimes the way my Millie left home, complete
+even to hand-crocheted washrags. Three of us had to sit on her trunk.
+You'm _Goyem_, not?"
+
+"I was reared in the Unitarian Church, if that's what you mean,
+until--well, I guess until I sort of figured out my own religion
+for myself."
+
+"We're Jews, you know, miss, in case you should have any _richas_."
+
+"_Richas?_"
+
+"Prejudices against us, like some. My husband has one of the finest
+cantor voices of any temple in the city."
+
+"No, no, Mrs. Neugass. I just love Jewish people. Some of the nicest
+folks we knew in St. Lo--I ever knew--have been Jews," cried Lilly, with
+the colossal, the unconscious patronage of race consciousness.
+
+It left no welt, however, across the sensibilities of Mrs. Neugass. The
+centuries had seen to that. She was craven and she was superb in
+her heritage.
+
+"I always say, thank God for whad I am, but it doan' matter to me whad
+anybody else is, just so she is that with the best she has in her."
+
+"Exactly. There--there is something I ought to say to you, Mrs. Neugass.
+You've made it so difficult, with your kindness, but I--well, I--There
+are certain conditions I want you to know about. I--Not a--I could
+only take the room for a few months, Mrs. Neugass, because I--"
+
+"Say, doan' I know how it is with students?"
+
+"No, no--"
+
+"They go home when it comes summer. You doan' got to worry. It ain't
+like we need it to pay rent with. You got my word it's all righd,
+Miss--The name, blease--Miss what?"
+
+"Par--Parlow. Lilly Parlow."
+
+"All righd, Miss Parlow; that makes everything fine."
+
+She opened her purse, unfolding a bill.
+
+"I'll pay now," she said, calm with sudden decision.
+
+"Sa-y, I would have trusted you. But you're like me, I always say money
+speaks louder than words."
+
+"I'll be right back, Mrs. Neugass."
+
+"That's good. I'll have out fresh towels. That's one thing I doan'
+expect from nobody is to stint on towels."
+
+And so it came about that at the moment Robert Visigoth was confronted
+with a sudden gap in his program, Lilly Penny, with almost the week's
+lodging still to her credit, was tiptoeing through the moldy halls of
+the house in Forty-fourth Street, her luggage hitting against wall and
+banisters and a palpitating fear fuddling her haste.
+
+At the second flight down she experienced her first and by no means
+fragrant encounter in these hallways. A door flew open with a rush and,
+her thin body wrapped in something ornate and flowing that was like a
+quick sheaf of flame around her, a woman dragged suddenly out to the
+head of the stairs, by the actual scruff of the neck, the ridiculous
+figure of a male, his collar--the necktie streaming from it--in
+his hand.
+
+She spat then a bombardment of screaming profanity that sickened Lilly
+as she stood unseen and flattened against the wall. A further shove sent
+him sprawling down the remaining stairs, and from the open doorway a
+flung waistcoat and coat draped him ludicrously as they struck.
+
+"Cheap skate! Piker! Skinflint!"
+
+Then a slamming, reverberating door, and, while she stood trembling and
+waiting, the creature on the stairs, a hulk of Swede with short, square
+teeth and a corner of lip that snarled back to bare them, scrambled into
+his coat, stumbling out the front door, collar still in his clutch.
+
+Then Lilly wound her weak-kneed way down the flight after him, softly,
+to save the creak, her luggage held out before her.
+
+The air outside seemed cleansing as water to her. She could not breathe
+deeply enough of it. For a long and indeterminate period she stood at
+the corner, Amsterdam Avenue car after car rumbling past, her luggage on
+the sidewalk and inclosing her in a little island.
+
+Indecision buffeted her. Even Mrs. Neugass and her apartment had
+suddenly become abhorrent; Broadway as barren as any granite gully and
+somehow terrifying. She strolled a block toward the station, yet it is
+doubtful whether in the back of her head Lilly did not know the impulse
+of home to be a mock one.
+
+The tremendous trifles began their running fire.
+
+Her mother pulling her corsets in so that they bottled her up more and
+more into the shape of an hourglass. That caster for the brass bed.
+Those interminable discussions over that caster for the brass bed!
+
+She boarded an Amsterdam Avenue car.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+The following months of her life always seemed to Lilly to have hung
+suspended without any forward march to them, and entirely surrounded
+with a colorless fluid which distorted reality, as a hand seen through a
+fish bowl of water is distorted. There descended upon her whole rows of
+days that were swollen with inertia. Her little window looked out upon
+an ocean of roofs, and across her distant horizon was a strident picture
+in electricity of an old woman in a Dutch cap beating a tub of
+proclaimed soap flakes into an incandescent froth.
+
+She would sit with her cheek crumpled against her hand, looking out over
+this, her mind hardly stirring. There still lay three one-hundred-dollar
+bills, crisply warm, against her bosom, and during the long arid spell
+that followed her first stroke of good fortune they were to her like a
+sedative touch, pressing down a more and more frequently recurring
+rise of fear.
+
+Two or three mornings a week she ventured in among the agencies,
+occasionally an address handed out to her which she followed up,
+always vainly.
+
+There was something gone from Lilly, these months, as if a line of
+resiliency within her had snapped like a rubber band. It showed most in
+her slowed step and her head not quite so flung up.
+
+One Saturday night she did earn twenty dollars, singing, a
+red-white-and-blue paper cap on her head, the "Star-spangled Banner" and
+the "Marsellaise" on the up-and-down-stream excursion of the Annual
+Convention of Commercial Photographers.
+
+During their clambake and dance at Grody's Grove, just beyond Coney
+Island, she remained on the boat, lying back in a deck chair, facing a
+night brilliantly pointed with stars. The machinery of her mind might
+have ceased with the chugging of the boat. She lay the five hours of her
+wait, floating in a state of the complete disembodiment of which she was
+peculiarly capable.
+
+At one o'clock the convention, highly inflamed, came trooping back on
+board, the boat nosing downstream, brilliant and terrible with orgy.
+
+Twice she was grasped by revelers who were little more than bashing
+bulls, and before she could fight them off, her face and neck, through
+the sheerness of her blouse, were covered with hot, wet, and beery
+kisses. The third time she fought off with her hatpin, inflicting a deep
+red scratch across a too loose jowl. She took refuge, finally, finding
+out by desperate instinct the only other woman on board. A cook down in
+the reeking kitchen of the one-screw steamer, who had grown old so
+horribly that her only remaining tooth was a tusk that hung deeply
+beneath her lower lip. But she found out a bench rug for Lilly, so that
+the trip home she lay there in the stench of strong foods and hot
+machinery, stupefied with misery.
+
+And yet, withal, a certain exultation had hold of her these strangely
+unreal weeks, her terror of the life about to be subdued somewhere
+underneath her consciousness, and each to-morrow reassuringly remote.
+
+The long unfettered days. Her own latchkey to come and go at will. The
+lay of those three crisp bills against her heart. Her little economies,
+however, grew against a day which she hardly contemplated and for which
+she certainly did not plan. Very often she ate in her own room, a
+sandwich and a bottle of milk from a corner delicatessen. She had
+already learned those small private economies of the petty and penny
+wise. The mirror-pasted handkerchief. The gas-jet-brewed egg. The
+hand-fluted ruching. Once, in her absence, Mrs. Neugass had pressed out
+her dark-brown-cloth coat suit, wrinkled from weeks in her suitcase, and
+which she had left hanging before the open window.
+
+The print of these kindly people was like an indelible rubber stamp into
+the premises. Mr. Neugass had already presented her with a jar of Millie
+face cream and a preparation for cleaning kid gloves. Sundays she was
+invariably importuned to dine with the family, and of occasional
+evenings, Alma Neugass, angular and full of the knobs of protruding
+neckbones, elbows, and shoulder blades, and with little sacs under her
+eyes as if she had wept down into them that life could be so tasteless,
+would knock at her door, and for an hour or two, and sometimes up to
+midnight, sit on the edge of Lilly's bed, the drone of their
+conversation surviving repeated rappings from the parental bedroom,
+adjoining.
+
+There was something about Alma of an old glove just about ready to
+breathe out and flatten from the print of a recent hand. Fifteen years
+of debit and credit and days which swung with pendulum fidelity within
+the arc of routine had creased and dried her of sap.
+
+The whiteness of Lilly and the swift, shining, backward rush of her hair
+were a source of wistful and vicarious delight to her. "Whoever named
+you Lilly was right," she said upon one of these midnight confabs so
+immemoriably dear to women, when hairpins can be removed and the dig of
+skirt bands unhooked. "You're so snowy, and soft, too; you feel like a
+kitten's ear. And that shining head of yours!"
+
+"But all my life I've wanted to be blond. Sun people I call them."
+
+"Millie is a blonde," said Miss Neugass, glancing toward one of the
+photographs that graced even Lilly's wall. "There's a girl was born
+in the sun!"
+
+"You've been part of her sun, Miss Neugass. Your parents have told me
+how for eight years half of your earnings went toward her education."
+
+"Life is a beehive, Miss Parlow," said Alma, her rather grandiloquent
+and apiarian simile highly inaccurate, "some of us are the drones, some
+the workers, and some the queens. Millie happened to be a queen."
+
+"How can you say that? Happened! What if Napoleon had never left
+Corsica, or Lincoln the backwoods, or Jeanne d'Arc her village, just
+because they decided environment had placed them there."
+
+"Quite right, but it is their being queens, drones, or workers
+determines their action."
+
+"Well, whether or not I was born for it, I aspire to be a queen."
+
+"Fine. Only be sure your arm is long enough to reach what you want."
+
+"But how can I tell if I don't stretch and stretch?"
+
+"You can't. Most of us never know when we've used up the last inch of
+reach, and keep on straining to touch what God or circumstance, or call
+it what you will, has placed beyond us."
+
+"Yes, but it is not knowing makes us capable of hoping and striving."
+
+"To me that is one of the tragedies of living. The hearts that pass by
+the jobs they are fitted for, to eat themselves out struggling to do
+what they think they're fitted for."
+
+"You're a fatalist."
+
+"Not at all. The way to know the reach of your arm is to sprain it. I
+sprained mine, and it wasn't until the ligaments began to pull that I
+had the courage to face the fact that I was made out of bookkeeper
+instead of concert-pianist stuff."
+
+"You, Miss Neugass, a pianist!"
+
+"Sounds queer to you, doesn't it?"
+
+"What--interfered?"
+
+"My own realization. One night before he moved from the neighborhood
+Doctor Feldman sent pa a pair of seats for De Pachman. I was seventeen
+then, and Millie seven. Ma stayed in the store and pa and I went. I
+remember as if it were yesterday. The concert was at Beethoven Hall and
+it snowed so that when we arrived I made pa slip off his shoes under the
+chair, for his socks to dry. I had been studying for eight years then
+and my teacher was arranging a recital. Strangest thing, but De Pachman
+played every single thing of Chopin's that I had on my own little
+repertoire, only under his touch it was real lace played into perfect
+design. I think pa must have lived through everything with me that
+night. He's got the finest musical instinct in the family, Millie
+included. We didn't say a word all the way home, but next day when I
+told him that I was going to business college on the money we were going
+to put into the recital, he didn't say a word, either. Just patted my
+hand. He knew! It wasn't so much a matter of technique, only when I
+played Nocturne in D flat a hammer inside the piano case hit a wire;
+when De Pachman touched those same keys a nerve kissed a heartbeat."
+
+"Alma--Neugass! You poor--you splendid girl!"
+
+Curled up there on the narrow bed, her bony profile against the wall and
+her knees hugged up to her after the manner of the excessively thin, a
+smile had come out on Miss Neugass's face as if the taste of
+renunciation were anything but bitter.
+
+"I don't know what kind of a pianist I might have made, but I do know
+I've made a good bookkeeper and that a little talent took a chance on
+stepping aside for a bigger."
+
+"You mean your sister?"
+
+"There's a talent for you! Millie has a voice like one of those
+revolving barber poles, as round at the bottom as it is at the top, and
+it goes up and up seemingly without end. There never was any doubt
+about Millie."
+
+"Oh, Miss Neugass, you frighten me! What if my arm is too short? Your
+sister's teacher, Ballman, to whom your mother sent me, says so little."
+
+"Ballman is a great voice builder, but he doesn't concern himself with
+the future of his pupils. He's a dear old fogy with a single-track
+mind."
+
+"What did he used to say of your sister?"
+
+"Nothing much except that he used to call her his wonder-child and shut
+up like a clam when we tried to discuss her future with him. What you
+need now, if you're ever really going to get anywhere, is an audition."
+
+"Audition?"
+
+"One of the big opera directors to hear you. It's not easy to arrange at
+the Metropolitan. Ballman has no pull. It takes a man like Auchinloss or
+Trieste or one of the big guns."
+
+"If only I could get started, Miss Neugass, on the right track!"
+
+"I'll tell you what I'll do. When Auchinloss comes this winter I'll have
+him hear you. That may pave the way to something. He's the prince of
+them all. His judgment never fails. He's only stamped his approval on
+five or six, but he's never missed. They say he heard Paula Anchutz
+singing her baby to sleep one night as he happened to pass her cottage,
+and he rang her door bell."
+
+"Auchinloss discovered Paula Anchutz!"
+
+"He decided her greatness after a few bars. Some day I'll read you
+Millie's letter home about her audition in Vienna. After about six bars
+of the 'Jewel Song' he leaped up over the footlights, screamed at her,
+kissed her, drew up a chair, and began to plan out the entire campaign
+of her future, so rapidly that the poor child said everything was
+swinging in circles before her."
+
+Her eyes two flaming orbits, Lilly sat staring, her lips slightly open.
+
+"And that was the beginning."
+
+"Yes, that was the beginning of--everything," said Miss Neugass, with a
+twist on her lips.
+
+"Oh, I--Even to hear it thrills me so that I--Thrills me so! But what,
+Miss Neugass--what if he hadn't--"
+
+"That is where you must make up your mind to take your medicine. There's
+an article about him in this month's _Musical Gazette_. If he thinks
+you've the stuff great singers are made of, it's a repetition of his
+scene with Millie every time. But this article goes on to say, if he
+rubs his hands together and says, 'Very nice,' and walks off, that means
+he thinks you will probably make a better bookkeeper or baby dandler
+than you will a prima donna. Millie used to write that around the opera
+house in Vienna, when Auchinloss started rubbing his hands together
+after an audition, everybody used to have the smelling salts ready."
+
+"Miss Neugass--you've heard me practice. Tell me the truth! Do you think
+my ambition is bigger than my voice? Tell me as you would your sister."
+
+The veil of a pause hung between them, Miss Neugass unfolding her legs
+and letting them hang over the side of the bed, as if she would flee
+the moment.
+
+"Why, I'm no critic, Miss Parlow. All I inherit is some of my father's
+natural musical instinct."
+
+"You're evading me, like Ballman does! Tell me! You may save me as you
+saved yourself. Am I chasing a phantom?"
+
+"I swear to you I don't know. I like your voice. I think it has a
+beautiful rich quality. I agree with Ballman, it has fine timbre."
+
+"Timbre--I'm tired hearing that--"
+
+"That counts in voice almost as much as range."
+
+"No, no, don't evade. You think it lacks range?"
+
+"I don't know. It lacks something--as if--well, if you'll pardon my
+saying it, as if it didn't reach as far as your temperament could
+fling it."
+
+"That's it exactly! I feel that about myself in everything--almost as
+if--as if it would take another generation of me to complete me--if--if
+you get what I mean."
+
+"There is something in that."
+
+"I know what you think in your heart. I'm a vaudeville product with a
+grand-opera aspiration."
+
+"I'm not capable of judging."
+
+"You judged your sister."
+
+"Ah, but Millie's voice there was no mistaking. Her talent needed
+hardly to be developed. It opened naturally, like a rose. Nine voices
+out of ten have to be drilled for like precious ore. Just you study on.
+I'll have Auchinloss hear you when he comes over."
+
+"You're sure, Miss Neugass, they're coming?"
+
+"That's what the papers keep saying. She's to sing three operas in
+January, with Auchinloss conducting. We're expecting daily to hear from
+my sister, verifying it."
+
+"You don't know--exactly?"
+
+"No."
+
+"If only--You don't think it will be this side of January? You see,
+after January my--my plans may be uncertain."
+
+"I understand. He's to conduct his own symphony in December, to be
+played the first time in this country, somewhere around Christmas in
+Boston, I think."
+
+"Will you be wanting this room then?"
+
+Miss Neugass swung her face with its considerable dip of nose toward
+Lilly.
+
+"You don't think this place will hold Millie any more? You don't think,
+for instance, the great Du Gass could receive the reporters--here!"
+
+"But, after all, it's her home."
+
+A levelness of expression came down over the face of Miss Neugass, as if
+a shade had been lowered across it, her voice, too, leveled of any
+inflection.
+
+"Of course," she said, "you know about my sister and--Auchinloss."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"Oh, I realize everybody knows--that is, everybody except my parents."
+
+"I didn't--"
+
+"That's because you don't belong yet! Wait until you've worked your way
+in a bit. I've known it long enough. Two years."
+
+"Then she--you--"
+
+"She was a baby when she left, Miss Parlow. Even if there had been the
+money to send me along with her, we wouldn't have felt the need of it. I
+could have staked my life on that child. Not that I'm blaming her, only
+I--God! I could have staked my life."
+
+"He's--"
+
+"Already married. She wrote me the whole story two years ago. It's an
+old one. So old it's got barnacles. I sometimes wonder it came to me
+with the terrible shock it did. She was so young--too young to get ahead
+so quickly even with her gifts. He has a son almost her age. He's forty
+and she's twenty. The wife in an insane asylum somewhere outside of
+Paris. Our Millie! I don't think I even realize it yet. Beauty and the
+Beast they call them in Milan."
+
+"Horrible!"
+
+"That baby. The whole world before her. It was all with her or nothing,
+she wrote, and she chose all. She sang six leading roles that first
+year. It made her. I--I don't blame her, somehow--that baby. It's him I
+hate. Sometimes I wonder how I'm going to hold back, when I lay hands on
+him, from--killing. But I won't. I'll grin and bear it just as if her
+beautiful little white self were no more to me than an alabaster vase
+after it's cracked."
+
+"And your parents?"
+
+"That's all she writes of, now that she thinks she is coming, to keep it
+from them! I wake up nights in a cold sweat over it. Wringing wet with
+the fear of my job."
+
+"Your mother and sweet little old father!"
+
+"That's it; they're like two babes in the woods morally. They don't know
+any gradation except black and white. Virtue and sin. A woman is good or
+a woman is rotten bad. She falls or she doesn't."
+
+"Oh, I know the relentlessness of that single-track code of right and
+wrong."
+
+"My stepmother, good soul that she is, would take the last stitch off
+her back for what she calls honest need, but I've seen her slam the door
+in the face of one of our neighbor girls in trouble who's come to my
+father begging for help--medicine. That's what I'm up against, Miss
+Parlow, keeping from those two old people what their daughter--is."
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear!"
+
+"I don't know why I'm airing my troubles here. God knows you are bottled
+up enough about yours, if you have any, but I thought surely you knew.
+Everyone does. Is it any wonder that my sister's home-coming is a
+nightmare to me? She doesn't want to come; I can read between the lines
+of her letter she's fighting it. But you see, Auchinloss is a great man.
+He's been invited to conduct his own symphony at its American _premiere_
+and naturally has taken this opportunity to bring about her American
+debut. You can imagine my parents' pride."
+
+"I can see it. Why, your father can't keep his face straight--he's
+always sort of smiling, slyly, to himself."
+
+"Their daughter, Millie du Gass, coming home with an opera triumph back
+of her in every European city, the great Auchinloss himself coming to
+conduct for her American debut. That is the kind of homecoming they're
+looking forward to and the kind I must make possible for them. My
+mother, who screams out every girl in trouble who dares to come into the
+drug store for help!"
+
+When Lilly bade Alma Neugass good night, they kissed, a dark bony hand
+lingering on each of Lilly's shoulders.
+
+"You've your decision before you yet, Miss Parlow, and you're young and
+pretty, too. Much as I love that little sister of mine, and can't find
+it in my heart to blame her, I know that somewhere there are women big
+enough not to have to pay the price. You--there's something about
+you--something so, if you'll permit me to say it, so boyish--so
+clean--so wholesome. You should be big enough not to have to pay
+the price."
+
+"If only I felt that your sister--cared. That is so horrible--the
+beauty-and-the-beast part. To place personal ambition above her
+body--the body that holds her soul! Ugh!"
+
+"She sent his picture. He's hairy like an ape. My. little white
+sister--he's--hairy, I tell you, like an ape."
+
+"I think I would have to want something--love something--enough to tear
+out my very heart for it before I could pay her price. Nothing on earth,
+Miss Neugass, can be so hideous--as that! I--I imagine it's flying in
+the face of the first law of nature--nothing so hideous as giving of
+self to--in--in--payment--"
+
+Tears were racking the worn form of Miss Neugass, Lilly wrapping her in
+arms that soothed.
+
+"You musn't," she said; "you've your big job ahead of you."
+
+Through the left wall came a sharp trilogy of raps.
+
+"All right, ma. Coming!" cried Miss Neugass, starting up instantly, her
+voice lifted and absolutely without tremor.
+
+That night Lilly dreamed the whole of her marriage. Her father with his
+face distorted by lather before his shaving mirror. The Leffingwell Rock
+Church. Little Evelyn Kemble placing the white-satin cushion. Herself
+and Albert finally locking the door of their new little home that
+wedding night.
+
+It was then she awoke with a scream.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+About a week later an advertisement in a morning paper caught Lilly's
+eye.
+
+WANTED:--Refined young woman of good appearance and soprano voice, to
+sing in music store. Must be able to accompany self. Apply between
+twelve and six. Broadway Melody Shop, 1432 Broadway.
+
+A recurring and dragging sense of lassitude was over her these mornings,
+so that it was all she could do to drag herself through two hours of
+practice in the parlor, scrupulously given over by Mrs. Neugass, who
+moved constantly and audibly about the kitchen.
+
+Her lessons, one every Tuesday morning, with Leopold Ballman, were
+tiresome unmusical periods of diaphragm exercises and an entire tearing
+down and reconstruction process of the previous methods taught her. It
+was tedious, standing before the long gold-and-black pier glass in the
+front parlor, watching the tendinous rise and fall of her lower thorax
+when her forbidden arias were on top of the piano and a cabinet of
+Millie du Gass's sheet music bulged there at her disposal.
+
+The old disturbing ache would climb up to the back of her neck, and her
+half-baked power of concentration falter at the arid monotony of,
+breathe-in; breathe-out.
+
+There were about five months between Lilly and the hour of her supreme
+travail. They might have been five years, while she paused suspended,
+as it were, in this state of abeyance that hung between the hot August
+day of her leave-taking of home and that chimeric hour ahead which
+depended like a stalactite, stabbing space.
+
+Her most tangible concern was a money one. The breaking of another
+one-hundred-dollar bill was imminent and it frightened her. She reduced
+her vocal lessons, at three dollars the hour, to one every other week,
+finally discontinuing entirely, and took to haunting the agencies daily,
+leaving her address where no initial charges were required and scanning
+incessantly the want advertisements under Amusements.
+
+She applied one Monday morning at the Broadway Melody Shop, a mere aisle
+wedged between a theater and a _rotisserie_, a megaphone inserted
+through a hole cut in the plate-glass frontage that was violently
+plastered over with furiously colored copies of what purported to be the
+latest song hits: "If I Could Be Molasses to Your Griddle Cakes."
+"Snuggle Up, Snookums." "Honey, Does You Love Me?" "Cakin' the Walk."
+"It's Twilight on the Tiber." "Tu-Lips for Mine!"
+
+A sort of managerial salesman in a number-thirteen-and-a-half collar and
+a part that ran through his varnished-looking hair bisecting the back of
+his head like a poodle's, and a soft, pimply jowl that had never borne
+beard, stuck up a random sheet of music on the piano, so placed that its
+tones carried straight through the megaphone to the sidewalk.
+
+She played and sang it off easily, her tones jaunty and staccato and her
+desire to please quivering through them. He stood beside her, the angle
+of his body so that the sharp bone of his hip pressed against her.
+
+"Rag up," he said once, insinuating the movement with a slight wriggle
+that ran through his apparently rigid body. She quickened her speed,
+leaning forward to read more surely:
+
+     "Uh-uh! my ba-a-aaby,
+      You drive me cra-azy,
+      Uh-uh! quit shovin',
+      I'm only lov--in'."
+
+The words running along to a stuttering syncopation that filled her with
+self-disgust as she sang them. But she finished with quite a flourish,
+swinging around on the stool to face him.
+
+"You need ragging up, kiddo. You've the speed of a funeral march."
+
+"A little practice is what I need," she said, half hoping to obtain.
+
+"I'll try you at fifteen a week. Eleven to six Tuesday, Thursday, and
+Friday. The other evenings we close at eleven; fifty cents extra for
+supper money. You on?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Slick, ain't you? Who peeled you to-day, Miss Bermuda Onion? Aw,
+touchy! No harm meant. You're too big to suit me; I like 'em squab size.
+Rag up a bit between now and to-morrow, Miss Onion."
+
+For five weeks in the little slit of store that was foul with tired and
+devitalized air, and concealed behind a screen that shut off the
+megaphone device, Lilly sang through an eight and sometimes a
+twelve-hour day, her voice drifting out to the sidewalk with a remote
+calling quality.
+
+To her relief she quickly learned that Mr. Alphonse
+Rook--"Phonzie"--spent the greater part of his time at the office of the
+Manhattan Music Publishing Company, under which auspices the Broadway
+Melody Shop operated.
+
+He was replaced by a salesgirl of such superlative dress and manner that
+her long jet earrings were like exclamations at the audacity of her
+personality. An habitual counter line-up of Broadway mental brevities in
+the form of young men with bamboo sticks and eyes with perpetual ogles
+in them, would while away the syncopated hours with her, occasionally
+Lilly emerging from behind her screen to "come up for air," as Miss
+Gertrude Kirk put it.
+
+She was "Gert" to the boys, and from the propinquity of that sliver of
+store and the natural loquacity of Miss Kirk, which would have
+overflowed a much more generous area, Lilly was to learn much of life as
+it is lived on that bias which is cut against the warp and woof of
+society. Miss Kirk had twice been up in night court. Her mother
+alternated under three aliases and was best known on the night boat that
+plied between New York and Albany. Occasionally this mother visited upon
+her daughter, her laughter hitting through the store like cymbals. She
+had the sagging flesh of an old fowl and cheeks that had not been
+cleansed of rouge long enough for the pores to breathe in and keep the
+flesh alive. To Lilly she was as terrible as a plucked hen on a
+butcher's block, with her head dyed to a vicious cock's-comb red and the
+wattles of loose skin beneath her chin.
+
+In fact, she was familiarly known around the shop as "old bird," and on
+one occasion had invited Lilly for a Sunday excursion "up to Albany."
+
+"Lay off, ma," said her daughter. "Fer Gossake, can't you take a
+tumble?"
+
+Miss Kirk's tongue was as nimble as her fingers. She used them both
+lightly. Would tear the flounce off her too lacy petticoat to bind up a
+messenger boy's cut finger, and no scarf-pin that came within three feet
+of her was immune from her quick touch. The only hour that ever struck
+for her was sex o'clock. The unmentionable lay mentioned in her
+discourse so frequently that to Lilly the Broadway Melody Shop became a
+slimy-sided vat, horrible with small-necked young men with flexible
+canes and Gertrude Kirk's slit-eyed stare of calculation.
+
+"I don't know what you're trying to put over, Lilly-of-the-valley;
+you're one too many for me. But I'd stake my life on one thing."
+
+"What?"
+
+"You got a caul over your face."
+
+"A what?"
+
+"Caul. Sort of veil some get born with. I know a girl carried hers
+around in a little wooden box for luck. Well, you got that white-veil
+kind of look that would blacklist you for the Vestal Virgin Sextet. I
+can pick 'em every time. You look to me like--say, I got a little mud
+puddle of my own to play in without wetting my feet in yours."
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," said Lilly, crashing
+out the opening bars of "Oh, Willie, I love you when you're silly."
+
+"No?" said Miss Kirk, the slit-eyed stare of terrible sophistication
+narrowing down to two blade edges.
+
+That night Lilly eyed herself in all the plate-glass windows as she
+walked to the car. She was straight as a lance, but before she went to
+bed she readjusted the gathers of her skirt band, pushing them forward.
+
+One evening, because she saw it in the window of one of the Amsterdam
+Avenue petty shops, she bought, furtively, a baby dress with a little
+nursery legend embroidered on the yoke. She stole home with the package
+up under her coat, like a thief. Once in her room, she laid it out on
+the bed. It was as tiny as the French apron of the French maid who opens
+the play, and as sheer. She wanted suddenly to finger it, and did,
+laying her cheek to it with a rushing sense of sweetness, and then
+suddenly, on wild lashing tears of her resentment and terror, her hands
+tightening into and wringing it. Dragging the suitcase out from beneath
+her bed, she crammed in the little garment, and finally, strapping down
+the lid again, laid her head against it, silently screaming her despair.
+
+Strangely enough, that very night, long after the street noises had
+thinned and she had heard Isaac Neugass, creeping up from the drug
+store, drag the bolt across the apartment door, Lilly sat suddenly up in
+bed out of a hot tossing period of light doze. She was often crying
+unconsciously into her sleep these nights, so that her eyes were
+tear-bitten and dilated into the darkness. The night bell that connected
+from the drug store was gouging the silence with a long-sustained
+grilling. Soft-soled feet were already padding down the hallway past her
+door, a bolt withdrawn, then voices.
+
+The grunty tones of Mr. Neugass and a woman's fast soprano that rose and
+rent the silence like the tear of silk. More feet down the hallway; sobs
+that were filled with coughing; Mrs. Neugass, pitched high in the key of
+termagency; the faint, expostulatory voice of Alma Neugass; and finally
+one throat-torn sob that grated like a buzz saw against the night and
+the banging, reverberating slam of a door.
+
+Barefooted, trembling in the chill, Lilly peered out into the hallway,
+the grotesque procession returning down its length. Mr. Neugass bent to
+his tired angle, nightshirt striking him midships as it were, the two
+dim white women creeping after.
+
+"What has happened?"
+
+"It's nodding, Miss Parlow. It's a shame for decent beoble they should
+have to listen. Wash your ears out of it, Alma, and go back to bed."
+
+But instead, to Lilly's importuning arm, Miss Neugass slid into her
+room, closing the door softly behind her, standing there shivering in
+the blue kind of darkness.
+
+"It's the old story," she said--"some girl in a fix and trying to get pa
+to help her. It makes me sick, positively sick."
+
+"A fix?"
+
+"Every once in a while some poor creature comes begging pa to break the
+law and help her. It gets him wild. Any girl who doesn't want her child
+is a monster and every girl in trouble a vicious sinner. This poor
+little thing didn't look seventeen; I couldn't quite understand her. A
+Pole, I think. Something about the beach at Coney Island. A man she'd
+never seen before or since. My mother in her righteousness! Her
+terrible, untempted righteousness. Her easy righteousness. The law in
+its righteousness. It can be just as wrong and horrible to have children
+as it can be sublime. What right has that little underbred girl to bring
+an illegitimate life into the world? The law doesn't provide for the
+illegitimate child. Why should it provide for its birth? What right had
+my father to withhold his help? ... There are worse crimes than taking
+human life; one of them is to give life under such conditions."
+
+"You mean, Alma, there's a way not to--a way out?"
+
+"Why, you poor baby! Of course there is if you see to it in time. That
+is, during the first few weeks."
+
+"How--many?"
+
+"Oh, five or six at the outside. Go back to bed, girl; you'll catch your
+death. O Lordy! such is life!" And went out.
+
+For the third time in her life, Lilly fainted that night, standing
+shivering in her nightdress for a second after Miss Neugass had left. In
+a room barely wide enough to contain her length she dropped softly
+against the bed, and, her fall broken, slid the remaining distance to
+the floor.
+
+After a while the chill air from the open window revived her and she
+crept shudderingly into bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Two weeks before Christmas such a gale of house-cleaning swept through
+the Neugass apartment that the scoured smell of pine-wood floors and the
+scrubbed taste of damp matting lurked at the very threshold.
+
+Then one Sunday morning Mlle. Millie du Gass and maid, also Felix G.
+Auchinloss, were registered at the Waldorf.
+
+All that day there wound into Lilly's room the aroma of fowl simmering
+in their juices, the quick hither and thither of feet down the hallway,
+and later the whirring of an ice-cream freezer and the quick
+fork-and-china click of egg whites in the beating. For days she had
+hardly glimpsed the family, except as they passed her on excited little
+comings and goings, and always package-laden. A strip of new hall carpet
+appeared, Miss Neugass nailing it down one night, calling out short,
+excited orders through a mouthful of tacks. The piano had been tuned.
+
+A sense of delicacy kept Lilly to her room that bright cold Sunday. She
+did her breathing exercises; washed out some handkerchiefs and
+stockings; tightened the buttons on a pretty new brown coat with a touch
+of modish stone-martin fur at the collar which she had purchased, not
+without qualms, for twenty-seven dollars and a half, at an
+advertised sale.
+
+Then for two long immobile hours she sat with her cheeks crumpled into
+her palms, staring out across the sun-washed roofs and roofs.
+
+At noon she took in a bottle of milk from the window sill, thawed it,
+slid a hatpin along the wrapping of a new tin of biscuit. She alternated
+between bites and sips, sitting on the bed edge, her gaze into the
+design of the wall paper.
+
+At home they must be sitting down to dinner, her father adjusting his
+napkin by the patent fasteners and tilting back his head for the
+invariable preamble of throwing the contents of his water tumbler down
+at a gulp. Her mother in the hebdomadal polka-dotted foulard, her bangs
+frizzed. Albert gnawing close to the drumstick, jaws working.
+
+As a matter of fact, just that scene was at just that moment in its
+enactment, and in all the fullness of her intuition she now knew it as
+unerringly as if it had flowed in replica to her through time and space,
+etching itself in dry point into her consciousness.
+
+How often and with uncanny fidelity to fact her retroactive state of
+mind had guided her step by step over the site of the domestic disaster.
+
+Her parents' home, reaching around like an amoeba, inclosing Albert in
+living walls. The slow readjustment, dumfounded rage, and despair
+simmering gradually to bitterness and hardening finally to despair. The
+soft, sensitive ground of their sorrow constantly spongy with the
+wellsprings of grief beneath, but the surface bubbles showing less and
+less, and ultimately a hard dryness setting in. Her heart would hurt as
+tangibly as if the surface of her body were red with a wound from it,
+yet, sitting there at her milk and biscuit, her gaze into the monotonous
+repetition of wall-paper design, the thought of that Sunday dinner out
+there, with its invariable roast chicken, bread stuffing, candied sweet
+potatoes, and lemon-meringue pie; the Sunday-afternoon lethargy; the
+hypothenuse of her father asleep in his chair, the newspaper over his
+face; Albert, the celluloid toothpick moving along his lips, puttering
+around at favorite locks and bells; the mere visualization was such a
+fillip to her present that she lay back on the bed, stretching her arms
+and legs like a great, luxurious cat, her lips curved to a smile.
+
+At five o'clock, as she lazed there, Alma Neugass burst in without the
+usual scrupulously observed preamble of a knock. There were two round
+spots of color out on her long cheeks, and her white cotton shirt waist,
+always bearing the imprint of sleeve protectors, was replaced by a
+dark-blue silk of candy-stripe plaid, with a standing collar of lace
+that fell in a jabot down the front, held there by an ivory hand of a
+brooch. There was something of the mausoleum about poor Alma, the grim
+skeleton of her everyday personality finding but icy warmth beneath the
+ivory, lace, and the seldom-warn black broadcloth skirt that was pinned
+over two inches at the waistline to hold it up.
+
+"Did you think I'd forgotten you? I haven't--but it's been such a rush."
+
+She sat down on a chair edge, pressing a bony hand to her brow.
+
+"You poor thing, you're dead tired."
+
+"They're here, you know. Docked this morning, almost twenty-four hours
+ahead of schedule. They--they would have come up immediately, but
+customs detained them three hours. They are at the hotel now and won't
+be up until supper. It's all so confusing. The reporters and
+photographers on their trail. He won't let anyone at her until she's
+rested. I talked to him over the telephone. His voice is--hairy."
+
+"I've never seen you look so nice, Miss Neugass."
+
+"If I stop to think, I'll scream."
+
+"Then you mustn't stop, dear."
+
+"You should see my father; he can't sit still. I never realized how
+little and--old he's getting until I put his black suit on him. He's so
+full of pride he--Oh, what a mockery--for him to dare to come
+here--home--with her."
+
+"Miss Neugass--this is not the time. Not now."
+
+A cocaine sort of courage seemed to lock her face back into its rather
+nondescript immobility.
+
+"You're right," she said. "I'm acting like a fool," and rose. "What I
+came in to say, get into that little pink dress of yours about
+nine-thirty and I may be able to manage it for you to-night. Two minutes
+of his time may mean everything to you and nothing to him."
+
+Lilly flashed to her feet.
+
+"To-night!"
+
+"Keep your head. Sing the 'Jewel Song.' It's always a good, showy
+standby. Let go--the way I heard you practice the other Sunday
+morning--and forget that it's Auchinloss or anyone else listening
+to you."
+
+"No, no, not to-night, Miss Neugass. I--I'm not prepared. It's too
+sudden."
+
+"It's as good as any other time. Besides, to-night we have him here, and
+there is no telling when we will again. This isn't what you would call
+the ideal headquarters for a pair of celebrities. I suppose, if the
+truth is known, Millie dreads bringing him here at all. Besides, they
+leave to-morrow for Boston, and with the line-up of entertainments the
+newspapers say are planned for them, there is no telling when we will
+get him alone again."
+
+"I'm not in voice these days. It's all roughened up since I'm singing
+downtown. I--oh, I'm not ready to-night, Miss Neugass."
+
+"Nonsense! Don't ask Opportunity to wait outside when he knocks. He may
+move on and not return."
+
+"I--I'm so frightened. I've such--such odds against me--right now. What
+if he only rubs his hands and says, 'very nice'? What if--"
+
+"That's where you'll have to swallow your medicine. After all, even the
+great Auchinloss represents only one man's opinion."
+
+"But his judgment has proved itself--time and time again."
+
+"That's why you have the chance to-night that comes once in a lifetime.
+Take it."
+
+"I will!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+It was just before midnight, after a four-hour period of waiting in the
+pink mull dress, when came the summons which brought Lilly into the
+presence of Felix Auchinloss.
+
+Cramped from the long period of taut waiting, she was so dry of throat
+that in spite of constantly sipped water she could only gulp her reply
+to Miss Neugass's knock and eagerly inserted head.
+
+"Quick! He'll hear you now before they leave." She followed her, without
+a word, down the hallway and into a front parlor brilliant with the
+full-flare gas jets, a bisque angel in the attitude of swinging dangling
+from the chandelier, and, swimming in the dance, a circle of faces.
+
+"Miss Parlow, this is my sister, Millie du Gass."
+
+A Greek chorus could have swayed to the epiphany in Millie's voice.
+
+With her short bush of curls, little aquiline profile true to her
+father's, tilted upward, as if sniffing the aerial scent, her slender
+figure Parisienne to outlandishness, the stream of Millie's ancestry
+flowed through the tropics of her very exotic personality. She was the
+magnolia on the family tree, the bloom on a century plant that was heavy
+with its first bud. Even at this time, slightly before her
+internationalism as a song bird was to carry her name to the remote
+places of the earth, a little patina of sophistication had set in,
+glazing her over and her speech, which carried the whir of three
+acquired languages.
+
+"And this is Doctor Auchinloss. I've told him about you and your
+eagerness for a foothold. He's going to give you a little home-made
+audition. Will you hear Miss Parlow now, Doctor Auchinloss?"
+
+The face of Felix Auchinloss, also to become familiar through subsequent
+years of American dictatorship, seemed by the hirsute vagary of a black
+beard joining up _via_ sideburns with a Pompadour of sooty black, to
+peer through a porthole. It did just that. A face in window looking out
+with very quick perceptions which ruffled it not at all, upon a world
+that came to him chiefly through two channels, his supernaturally
+attuned hearing and his palate.
+
+He could detect a slurred note of the sixteenth violin in the crash of a
+ninety-piece ensemble of orchestration, and one-eighth-of-a-second
+miscalculation of his two-minute egg could embroil a breakfast table. A
+creature of elbows and knees, such as a chimpanzee is, the backs of his
+hands were hairy, but the eye seldom strayed from his face. It knew its
+Huxley, that face, its Hegel and its Kant. It loved the smoothness of
+young girls' bodies. It was attuned to the music of the spheres. It
+could hold in leash the outrageous temperaments that responded to his
+baton and look with impassivity, even cruelty, upon torture. Mostly the
+torture of women. Also it could brighten out of its imperturbability at
+the steaming sight of a dish of _sauerbraten_.
+
+There had been no _sauerbraten_ on Mrs. Neugass's festive board, rather
+fowl, in a white glue of gravy and great creamy dumplings, and under
+three helpings and the steady pour of an extra lager the great
+Auchinloss had expanded and expounded.
+
+His glance, still warmed, took in Lilly at a sweep finding resting place
+at the swell of her bosom.
+
+There was something about Lilly as she stood thereof the winglike
+smoothness of a little wild duck, wet from a skim across water. A slick
+and pale kind of beauty which ordinarily held little appeal for him
+except that her bosom was very white. Very, very white, he thought.
+
+"Zoprano?" he asked, his gaze still beneath her chin.
+
+"Lyric soprano."
+
+"Om-m-m-m!" After the manner of having his doubts.
+
+"You accompany her, Felix," said Miss du Gass, not unkindly and actually
+with an intensive kind of eagerness, as if for the diverting of
+his interest.
+
+He seated himself at the piano, his great knees at a wide stride, hands
+riding down the keyboard in an avalanche of improvised octaves.
+
+In black silk that stood away from her, Mrs. Neugass sat by, not
+releasing hold of Millie's hand, her eyes as if they could never finish
+their feast of her. Her timidity forbade her much that she would say,
+and so she sat smilingly silent and held the little ring-littered hand,
+stroked it and lay it to her cheek. To Lilly, who had never seen her out
+of the cotton-stuff uniform of housewife, it seemed to her that
+something of her Old Testament beauty had died beneath the bunchy jetted
+taffeta that brought out in her the look of peasant--her husband in
+camphoric broadcloth suffering the same demotion.
+
+"Now doan' get egcited," said Mr. Neugass, himself shaken of voice.
+"Remember it is home folks."
+
+"She's all right, pa, if you don't make her nervous," said Miss Neugass,
+seating herself stiffly on a stiff chair, her face, as the evening wore
+on, cold of its flush, and tired rings coming out beneath her eyes.
+
+"What do you prefer to sing?" asked Millie du Gass, again, kindly.
+
+"The 'Jewel Song.'"
+
+On her words the opening bars crashed out, and, to Lilly's
+consternation, far too rapidly, so that she ran with her breath, as it
+were, for the opening notes, lifting to it nicely, however, and, by
+miracle, quite at her truest.
+
+The state of her invariable vocal exultation began to mount, her
+consciousness of scene to recede, and, anticipating her coloratura
+climax, she started to climb, building for warble. Her blood was
+pounding and her voice in flight. Up went her chin. It was then Felix
+Auchinloss swung on the stool, snipping off the song like a thread, his
+face in its window, full of a new impassivity, and this time his eyes
+off somewhere behind Lilly's left ear.
+
+"That is verra nize," he said, moving restlessly about the room as if to
+throw off an irksome moment, and then winding his hands and winding
+them, "a pretty voice as far as it goes, and verra, verra nize."
+
+There was a silence that seemed to wait, and Millie du Gass, her laugh
+like glass beads falling from a snapped chain:
+
+"You must come down to the hotel, dear, some day, where I've a concert
+grand. This darling old tin pan! You should have seen, Felix, the way
+pops used to make me practice on it, rapping me over the knuckles. You
+old darling pops!"
+
+"Papa's baby-la," he said, pinching her cheek.
+
+"If you will excuse me now, please, I--won't, intrude any longer."
+
+"Good night, dear; it was just lovely. Good night," joined in
+everybody, too kindly.
+
+Walking out of that room, Lilly was conscious suddenly of passing
+through a prolonged stare, especially from Mrs. Neugass, who leaned
+forward slightly in her chair--a stare that prompted her somehow to
+quicken her departure almost to a run.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out of a night that had flowed around her in a bitter sort of blackness
+that fairly threatened to drown her, she floated up toward morning to an
+exhausted doze, her face tear-lashed and her breathing sucked in sobbily
+as she slept.
+
+It was out of this that she awoke suddenly to a bombardment of knocks at
+her door.
+
+"Come!" she cried, sitting up rather alarmedly in bed, and holding the
+blanket over her chest. She was lovely and disheveled with sleep, her
+whiteness whiter because of the most delicately darkened oyster shells
+beneath her eyes.
+
+It was Mrs. Neugass. She was pleasantly shapeless again in cotton stuff,
+her bosom bulging down and over the jerked-in apron strings.
+
+"Wait, I'll get up and close the window, Mrs. Neugass!"
+
+"You doan' need to," she said, slamming down the window herself, opening
+the floor register, and seating herself rigidly on the chair that faced
+the bed. "I want a little talk with you, blease."
+
+"Why, yes, Mrs. Neugass!" A wave of memory and a sense of physical
+misery swept over Lilly so that it was difficult for her to force the
+smile. But she did, sitting up in bed and hugging her knees with bare
+shining arms.
+
+With nervousness patent in every move, Mrs. Neugass sat forward,
+pleating and unpleating a little section of her apron.
+
+"I guess you know it, Miss Lilly, that with all the honors we got by our
+daughter, we're still blain, respegtable beoble."
+
+"Of course--"
+
+"For fifteen years in one business in one neighborhood we've such a
+standing that from three blocks around they come to my husband he should
+keep their savings. My girls--I can say it on a bible--more than
+anything around them was always respegtability."
+
+"But why--"
+
+"If I'm mistaken, Miss Luella, and blease God I should be, then excuse
+me for a foolish old woman, but is--is everything all right with you,
+Miss Luella?"
+
+"Mrs. Neugass, I--What do you mean?"
+
+"I took you in for a student, a girl alone from her home town, but not
+once since you're with us--I can't help it I got eyes--so much as a
+postal card. All right, I said time and time again to my husband, she
+don't have friends to come and call on her, because she's a stranger in
+New York. Neither did my Millie have so many friends, I guess, the first
+few weeks in Munich. But no letters--not a line! I know _goys_ ain't so
+strong on family ties, but once in a while a letter--"
+
+"I don't quite see where the matter of my correspondence can be of
+interest to you, Mrs. Neugass."
+
+"No, but it is of interest to me if everything is all right with you. If
+everything is over and above-board, as the saying is, Miss Luella!"
+
+There was a throb to the silence, as she sat upright there in bed, that
+seemed to shape itself about her, like a trap. She buried her face
+suddenly into her hands.
+
+Then Mrs. Neugass rose, edging around the back of her chair as if to get
+clear of even propinquity.
+
+"I'm right?" she cried, hoarsely and rather coarsely. "I'm right, then?
+I took into my home a bad girl?"
+
+"No!--No!--No!--"
+
+Out of bed, her feet hastily into slippers and fumbling into her kimono
+so that the flow of her hair went down inside it, Lilly approached Mrs.
+Neugass, her gesture toward her and entreating.
+
+"Mrs. Neugass, you're horribly wrong in what you suspect. You must
+listen to me--"
+
+"You can exblain nothing to me except to get your clothes packed. How it
+goes to show you never can tell beoble from looks. Even my husband, who
+never gets deceived in human nature, 'She's a refined, intelligent girl
+to have around,' he says. My stepdaughter! A girl I am as careful with
+as if she was still eighteen, should go out of her way to get you before
+Auchinloss! No wonder he says it you are limited and that you fall just
+short of fine talent. You don't deserve it no better. Ain't you ashamed?
+You bad girl, you! I'm only sorry for the mother you say you got--your
+poor mother!"
+
+"Mrs. Neugass, this is outrageous! You haven't the right to speak to me
+like this! It was wrong, I admit, to--to deceive you. But I had my
+reasons--you wouldn't have taken me in. I'm not what--what you think
+I am!"
+
+"I don't care what you are and what you ain't. I only want you to pack
+your bags and go."
+
+"I won't go until you've heard me out!"
+
+"We're respegtable beoble!"
+
+"Oh, I know, Mrs. Neugass, your kind of respectability. I was reared on
+it. It's the cruelest respectability in the world. It has no outlook
+except through the narrow little bars of the small decencies you have
+erected about yourselves."
+
+"That fine talk don't save a girl's skin when she's in such a fix like
+you!"
+
+"I've more claims to your precious kind of respectability than you--than
+you think!"
+
+"I don't _think_ no more. I know! I don't say it's the nicest thing I
+should have looked once through your things. Even then I must have felt
+it in my bones. That little dress with the nursery rhyme on the
+yoke--how it was I didn't get suspicious then? All of a sudden last
+night, though--even while you was singing, it come over me, all these
+weeks I must have been blind."
+
+"I tell you I'm a married woman. I was married last July in the
+Leffingwell Rock Church in St.--in a city I don't care to name. I
+suppose that constitutes me a moral woman in your world of cautious
+morality. But in my eyes I'm a moral leper. Not because I did not marry,
+but because I did. Married for every reason in the world except love. No
+marriage ceremony in the world can condone the immorality of that!
+Society may, but God doesn't. From your point of view, then, I'm a
+respectable woman. From mine, I'm rotten."
+
+"I don't know what it is you're talking aboud. If you are what you say
+you are, what does it mean living around in decent beoble's houses in a
+condition like yours? It's an insult to my daughters you should be here.
+The right kind of a married woman don't live around New York in such a
+way like you. There is something very crooked in the woodpile."
+
+"If that is what bothers you, won't you please, dear Mrs. Neugass, sit
+down and let me tell you the whole story? I need you--"
+
+"The whole story, Miss--Mrs. Parlow--or whatever it is you call
+yourself--ain't what bothers me. All I want is you should go while my
+husband is down in his store and my daughter in her position. I am
+ashamed they should know. I'm lucky yet I saved myself from having a
+disgrace in the house a few weeks from now."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Neugass, be careful! You may have cause some day to--"
+
+"A singer she wants to be! Is it any wonder, miss, you got no luck? A
+girl like you don't deserve it. I'm sorry enough for your poor mother.
+Married or no married, I want you should leave here. Quick, you bad
+girl, you! I'll wait outside till you go."
+
+So Lilly was subjected to the bitter, the unspeakably vulgar humiliation
+of gathering her belongings like any culprit servant girl, cramming
+them, blind with tears and frenzy, into the suitcase and valise, tears
+scalding down and rolling over her hands as she dressed.
+
+As she staggered finally down the hallway, the two bags grating the
+walls and her hat awry from haste, Mrs. Neugass stood at the door,
+holding it open.
+
+"Here," she said, "is your rent back for four days--"
+
+"Don't you dare, Mrs. Neugass, to offer me that! Only let me out,
+please, from this outrageous predicament."
+
+"You got righd. It is a outrageous predicament. Ach! shame on you! Such
+a fine, clean-looking girl like you. Indeed, you don't got to ask to be
+let out twice."
+
+Thirty minutes later, and because her wildly beating brain could figure
+out no alternative, Lilly sat on a bench in the waiting room of the
+Grand Central Station, bags at her feet, trying to subdue her state of
+trembling.
+
+Eleven o'clock moved around largely on the station clock. She was due at
+the Broadway Melody Shop. Still she sat on, the palpitating surface of
+her gradually slowing its throb. The reverberating terminal, then at the
+excavating state of its gigantic reconstruction, rang to the crash of
+steel with the fantastic echo of tunnel and of blasting. Its constant
+conglomerate of footfalls reduced to the common denominator of a
+gigantic shuffle, it swelled toward the noonday schedule, with more and
+more rapid comings and goings. A light snow was announcing itself in
+little white powderings across overcoat shoulders and in the crevices
+of derbys.
+
+The new brown coat enveloped her warmly enough, but she shivered as she
+sat, at the same time committing the paradox of unbuttoning and flinging
+its double-breastedness away from the beating of her very being. After a
+while she gave over her bags to the obliging eye of a shawled Polish
+girl on the bench beside her and crossed to the Information Bureau. A
+clerk gave her precedence over two men.
+
+Yes, there was a St. Louis train out at two-five. Another at six.
+
+She returned and sat in the midst of a third bustling hour. A young
+woman with an infant, and a whole archipelago of luggage surrounding
+her, finally replaced the Polish girl. She was as fadely and straggily
+pretty as a doll that has been left lying on the lawn throughout a night
+of heavy dews. Every so often the tiny head would spring back from the
+soft fount of her breasts, a cry rising thin and spiral as smoke.
+
+"Sh-h-h, baby! He won't eat," she said, plaintively. "It's just
+terrible; we've tried everything and he won't eat."
+
+Lilly put out her hand toward the small ball of head, but withdrew it.
+
+"Poor little baby!"
+
+"My sister's gone to the matron to get him some barley water before he
+gets on the train. There is a grand matron here at the station. I left
+him with her all morning while we shopped, and he never whimpered. The
+barley water was her idea. He won't eat. It's terrible. He 'ain't gained
+in six weeks. The doctor says we've just got to keep trying until we hit
+a formula that agrees with him."
+
+"Formula? How funny! Sounds like chemistry."
+
+The young mother cast a commiserating eye.
+
+"I'd hate to tell you what it sounds like about two P.X. I've been on a
+visit to my mother in Brooklyn, but he yelled so of nights the whole
+flat was kicking. You ain't, by any chance, taking the two-five St.
+Louis Limited, are you? Brazil, Indiana, is mine."
+
+"I--don't know--yet."
+
+"Ever been there?"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Brazil."
+
+"I've passed through."
+
+"Some dump, believe me. I keep saying to him, 'Keep me out here much
+longer, Fred, and you'll have to ship me home in a wooden kimono.'"
+
+"Wooden kimono?"
+
+"Coffin. Get me?"
+
+"Then Brazil isn't your home?"
+
+"By transplanting, yes. I never married out there, believe me. We was
+both born and raised right here on the little long and narrow island,
+till he got a better job out there with the telephone company. Believe
+me, I'll take my little old fifteen a week in New York to thirty a week
+out there, bungalow setting thrown in. Bunk-a-low, I call it."
+
+"But isn't it better for the baby?"
+
+"That's right, too. I always say to my twin, I say, 'Myrt, if you don't
+think I got harder hours than when I worked next to you in the Five and
+Ten, and no pay day, neither, just trade with me one day and take care
+of the kid and the bunk-a-low.' I always say to Fred, I say, 'If you
+think you're dog tired, fasten a speedometer on my ankle and read it
+when you come home nights and see who's taken the most steps.' It's
+hell, anyways, when they won't eat and you can't hit the right formula."
+
+"Poor baby!"
+
+"You wouldn't give 'em up after you got 'em, but believe me it's a wise
+girl will think twice before she has 'em. A girl gains a lot by
+marrying--maybe. But believe me, she gives up a lot--sure."
+
+"But you married the right man."
+
+"Yeh; but Nature is a trickster. How you going to know where her
+intentions leave off her and your own begin? Fred and me ran off.
+Regular love affair. I suppose I am one of them that picked right; right
+as a girl with my disposition could ever pick. If I hadn't, believe me,
+eight hours for me behind the counter in preference to eating the rest
+of my breakfasts across from the wrong face. Sh-h-h, Freddie baby! Can't
+you see my back is breaking? Sh-h-h! Auntie Myrt's gone to nice matron
+for barley water. For the love of Mike, sh-h-h! or mamma'll spank."
+
+The twin fluttered up then, a vivid italicized prototype, on slim tall
+heels that clicked and a very small red hat set just at the angle of
+sauciness. They moved off together after a bickering over luggage, the
+slim silhouette with the chin sharply flung up and the accentuated
+sway-back figure of the little mother, her skirt sagging over run-down
+heels, and, for want of a free hand, blowing up the loose strands of
+hair from out her eyes.
+
+For a time Lilly sat quite intently, her gaze on a small sign that hung
+at right angles from an open doorway, "MATRON." After a while she
+gathered up her luggage and walked over, entering a little room fitted
+up with the efficient and institutional unprivacy of public service. On
+a couch, her face to the wall, a woman in a traveling duster lay
+stretched, hat and all, in an attitude of exhaustion, a young girl with
+a wayward fling of posture, sitting sullen in a corner, her very pointed
+and heeled shoes toeing in. A three-year-old child with a large tag
+pinned across his little dress played with railroad-owned blocks; the
+matron, a sort of stout Lachesis, with a string of keys at her belt,
+gray with years and the rather sweet tiredness of service, sorted towels
+at a rack. It was to her that Lilly spun out a ready tale, reddening as
+she talked, but stanch to it.
+
+"I'm from Indianapolis. I want a quiet place for the next few months.
+Two, to be exact."
+
+Sweeping her with a look. "Are you in any kind of difficulty?"
+
+"No--not that! I've left my husband. We agreed to separate. I want a few
+weeks of quiet until--afterward, and then I can arrange to start out
+on my own."
+
+"You're too nice a girl to--"
+
+"I'm not asking anything. I am not the kind you are evidently accustomed
+to deal with here. It is simply that I'm strange."
+
+"Have you no friends?"
+
+"None with whom I desire to communicate."
+
+"Well," doubtfully, "there is the Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls
+and the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital--"
+
+"Oh," cried Lilly, with a sting of color to her cheeks, "you don't
+understand! I have funds. I tell you it is just that I am strange. I
+want a medium-priced place to live for the next few weeks, where it
+won't be embarrassing."
+
+The matron unlocked a drawer.
+
+"I have a few addresses here of private rooming houses in the Hanna
+Larchmont Lying-in Hospital and Bellevue districts, if that is what you
+want. Personally inspected places that can be recommended for their
+cleanliness and respectability."
+
+"That is exactly what I need."
+
+"You will find no questions asked so long as you conduct yourself
+quietly, and of course you are expected to make your plans for leaving
+well in advance of any emergency. There are several private sanitariums
+in the neighborhood."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Here are three addresses. The first is in East Seventeenth Street, just
+in back of the Hanna Larchmont. It's a very nice place run by an old
+Irishwoman who has a lace-curtain establishment in the basement. Here
+are two others on the same block, in case she has rented her room."
+
+"I'll go there at once," said Lilly, taking the memorandum.
+
+"If I were you I should go back home to friends. It is too bad that a
+girl like you should find herself in this position. Won't you let me
+help you?"
+
+"Thank you"--lifting her bags again--"you have helped me a great deal."
+
+That night Lilly slept in a small back room, two flights up, over a
+lace-curtain-cleaning establishment. It was cruder and rougher than
+anything she had yet encountered; a white-pine table with a washbowl and
+a toothbrush mug, and a black iron bed that at first glance had sent
+darting through her a sinking sense of institution. But it was clean,
+and a sparse Irish landlady with a moist pink presence that steamed hot
+suds had left her without question and one week's advance payment tucked
+into her bosom.
+
+Before going to bed, after she had looked under it and turned out the
+gas jet, she went over to her single window, opening it wide to the bite
+of a winter's night and shooting up the shade. Her view was again of
+roofs and roofs and chimney pots, dirtier, this time, and dingier, and
+marching against the sky line, like a dark herd of buffalo, a long range
+of buildings, blackened of bricks.
+
+It was the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital seen from the rear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+When Lilly returned to the Broadway Melody Shop that morning following,
+there was already a voice driving with such nasal power into the
+sidewalk din that she hardly needed to enter to learn of her successful
+replacement.
+
+There was an entirely new hauteur incasing Miss Kirk, who upon her
+entrance wound into an attitude.
+
+"Well!"
+
+"I was ill."
+
+"I--see."
+
+"I guess the place is filled. Oh, it's all right!"
+
+"Better go over to the office and see Phonzie about it. All I know is
+they sent over a pair of lungs that can stop traffic when they let out.
+Forty copies of 'Cinderella Ella' just like hot cakes the first time she
+telephones it out to 'em! Hauls in a netful every time she opens her
+mouth, and, some mouth! 'Phonzie,' I telephones over to him this
+morning, 'thank God she's screened from the public or somebody would buy
+her for codfish balls.'"
+
+"Do you think there might be something over at the office for me? I've
+had some training for desk work, too."
+
+"Don't know. I always told you to put some nose into your voice. Let
+out, that's what they want in this business. You never came out enough
+from behind your tonsils. The refined stuff through a megaphone has
+about as much chance as a violet in the six-o'clock rush. In other
+words, dearie," finished Miss Kirk, her rather close-set eyes focusing
+upon the tip of Lilly's nose, "I think you're fired. Canned, so to
+speak. Replaced, as it were."
+
+Lilly laughed, forcing her head high to deny disconcertment.
+
+"Well, anyway, that saves me the trouble of resigning."
+
+"Yes," said Miss Kirk, her gaze suddenly long and full of portent, "I
+wouldn't be surprised."
+
+To Lilly's heated consciousness the grilling quality in that gaze was so
+unmistakable that it plunged into her like an arrow. She walked out,
+stinging with it.
+
+Hurrying toward the music-publishing office, she caught suddenly her
+reflection in the plate-glass window of a shop devoted to Broadway's
+intense interpretation of the prevalent in modes. She stood, in the very
+act of motion, regarding this snapshot of herself. Then she entered,
+emerging presently in a full-length dark-blue cape with gilt buttons and
+little pipings of red along the edge. It was neither so warm nor so
+durable as the brown coat, and cost her the rather sickening sensation
+of breaking into a hundred-dollar bill for twelve dollars and
+ninety-eight cents.
+
+But it was immensely becoming, this flowing wrap, enveloping her like a
+wimple, her face rising out of it as clear as a nun's. Nevertheless, it
+was her realization of need for it that quite suddenly ended her quest.
+She turned for home, stopping at the Public Library for one of her
+frequent perusals of the St. Louis newspapers. She read quickly, her eye
+skimming the obituary, personal, and social columns. For a week there
+had daily appeared a little insertion which invariably caused her a
+twist of heart:
+
+To Sublet: Furnished. Seven rooms and bath. Brand new from top to
+bottom. Every convenience. Will sell furnishings if desired. Spacious
+front lawn. Poultry yard. 5199 Page Avenue. Apply 5198 Page Avenue.
+
+Then one day it disappeared and something lifted from Lilly's heart.
+This time, as she opened the St. Louis paper of just one week previous,
+a small oval photograph leaped at her from a row of them, choking her as
+if it had clutched at her throat.
+
+In a full-page advertisement, Slocum-Hines Hardware Company announced to
+its many friends a twenty-fifth anniversary, the entire sheet bordered
+in small oval photographs of the personnel of valued employees.
+
+"Albert Penny, first-assistant buyer." Regarding it, her consciousness
+of his promotion was secondary to a feeling that straight lines joining
+the four corners of Albert's face would have produced almost a perfect
+rectangle. A little farther on was Vincent Bankhead, buyer, and on a
+lower row, Ralph Sluder, with whom she had graduated from grade school.
+
+Strangely enough, in this very edition the name of Horace Lindsley
+sprang out at her from the tiniest of type in the marriage-license
+column. Horace Lindsley, 3345 Bell Avenue. Carol Ingomar Devine, 3899
+Westminster Place. The name of the bride was associated in Lilly's mind
+with the society columns of the Sunday _Post-Dispatch_. A hundred little
+pointed darts shot through her, and even now the old sinking but
+delicious sensation of too sudden descent in an elevator.
+
+That night she went to bed with a toothache, a biting little spark of
+pain that toward morning became a raging flame rushing against the
+entire inside of her cheek. She could not trace its source, every tooth
+seeming to stampede.
+
+All of the day following she lay with her face buried into her pillow,
+abandoning herself utterly to creature discomfort. Toward evening she
+ventured down as far as Fourteenth Street for a bowl of milk and toast,
+but the pain raged on, tightening her throat against food, and she crept
+back to the haven of her cheek to Mrs. McMurtrie's scorched pillow slip.
+
+After another two nights of local application and the rather futile
+business of holding warm water in the sag of her cheek, she found out,
+at the direction of Mrs. McMurtrie, a neighborhood dentist who occupied
+a suite of rooms over a corner drug store, the large grinning picture of
+a boy, with a delighted hiatus of missing front tooth, painted on each
+window and giltly inscribed, "It Didn't Hurt a Bit."
+
+It is inconceivable, except that under duress of great pain Lilly could
+have engaged services so obviously quasi professional, but she was past
+that perception by now, her nerves from brow to shoulder crackling like
+a bonfire.
+
+Examination by a dentist with gray pointed side whiskers that flared and
+brushed her cheek unpleasantly, revealed a pair of abscesses gathering
+within the gum, and for weeks of mornings she lay back to the agony of
+steel incisions, for the remainder of the day stretching out on her iron
+bedstead, face to wall.
+
+Then for a few days a premature spring came out teasingly. The East
+Seventeenth Street block, with its rows of houses, going down none too
+debonairly, from gentility to senility, showing a bud here and there.
+There even remained one private residence with a polished door bell and
+name plate and a little cluster of crocuses in an iron jardiniere set
+out in a front yard about the dimension of an army blanket.
+
+Crocuses, whose cold, moist smell, with all the pungency of associations
+an odor can arouse, somehow suggested, to Lilly, Taylor Avenue and
+little Harry Calvert. She did not remember it, but Harry had once stolen
+two satiny red ones for her from a Taylor Avenue flower bed and been
+soundly cuffed by a housewife.
+
+A block away, Gramercy Park, a rectangle of the Knickerbocker New York
+of the woodcut, red-brick sidewalk, salon parlor, and crystal
+chandelier, was already lacy with the first leafwork of spring. Several
+times, when the sun lay warmest, Lilly ventured into its Old World
+sobriety, strolling around the tall grill fence that inclosed the park.
+It was locked against the public, nursemaids from surrounding homes and
+a few old ladies stiff with gentility holding keys. Children from the
+raggedy fringe of Third Avenue played without awareness, against the
+outside of the iron palings, too young, and, anyway, too imprisoned in
+class, to resent one more monopoly even of God's sunshine and the brown,
+warm earth already swollen with life about to be.
+
+It seemed to Lilly that almost any of these mild days Washington Irving,
+in pot hat and lace in his sleeves, might come strolling this pompous
+Square. She bought a manhandled copy of Volume I of Knickerbocker's
+_History of New York_ off a secondhand bookstall one day, and read it
+sitting on the sun-drenched stoop of one of the old houses whose eyeless
+stare and boarded windows bespoke one absent family. Off this same stall
+she also purchased a volume of Wordsworth's poems, feeling a vague, a
+procreative, and who shall say mistaken need for beauty. Over and over
+she read, milking each phrase dry:
+
+     Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
+     The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
+     Hath elsewhere had its setting and cometh from afar.
+     Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness
+     But trailing clouds of glory, do we come from God who is our home.
+
+She read of daffodils as if she would steep her soul in the sun of their
+yellowness, bought some one morning and propped them in the
+toothbrush mug.
+
+She practiced her shorthand, too, these days, in a blank book bought for
+the purpose, sometimes an hour--even two or three--until the sun receded
+off the stoop.
+
+Then for a week it rained, and from the patch of back yard, two stories
+beneath her window, began to mount the moist smell of living earth.
+Beside this open window, after the harrowing mornings of dentistry, with
+a soft rain falling from a sky swift and low with clouds, she wrote, her
+pencil dabbing constantly at the well of her tongue, a short story of
+some six thousand words composed out of the fabric of an idea that
+suddenly presented itself. She copied it in her most painstaking
+handwriting, on one side of foolscap, and sent it, with return postage,
+to a popular magazine.
+
+She was venturing out less and less, preparing over a portable oil stove
+her own breakfast, and very often her own lunch and dinner. She tried to
+sew, too, cutting up one of the sheerest and prettiest of her nightgowns
+into a litter of small garments, but almost immediately her hands would
+fall idle and the great waves of terror begin to surge.
+
+Certain inevitable decisions crept closer. She decided against the
+Hanna Larchmont Hospital, its very foyer awakening in her such a
+sickening sense of public institution that she ventured no farther, but
+engaged a tiny room in a private sanitarium in Nineteenth Street, at
+twenty dollars a week, and the privilege of boarding on two or three
+weeks after her discharge.
+
+Her bag of three new one-hundred-dollar bills still hung in all its
+reassuring entirety from the little pink ribbon about her neck, but the
+confronting dentist's bill of twenty-five dollars, and the slow but acid
+process of daily expenditure eating into the thirty or forty dollars
+left in her purse, lay uncomfortably against her consciousness.
+
+By a series of constantly repeated calculations, particularly if the
+short story should bring in even a check large enough to cover the
+dentistry, Lilly planned to span the weeks of her narrowing interval
+with the three bills intact, but pretty shortly the first piece of mail
+she had received in New York arrived in a long, bulky envelope:
+
+MY DEAR MISS PARLOW,--Thank you for submitting the accompanying
+manuscript. It does not quite get across in this office, but it is near
+enough to our standard for us to want to see anything more you may care
+to submit.--THE EDITOR.
+
+That night Lilly cried again all through her sleep, presenting herself
+next morning at the dentist's with heavy, rimmed eyes. It was her final
+visit, and before mounting the chair she laid down her carefully
+counted-out payment, five five-dollar bills, in a little pile on the
+revolving stand.
+
+Doctor Hotchkiss, with the offshoot of white whiskers from each jowl,
+and who was fond of pinching her cheek as she lay under his touch,
+moistened his fingers and counted.
+
+"The charges are fifty dollars," he said.
+
+She was immediately startled.
+
+"Why, Doctor Hotchkiss, you said twenty-five!"
+
+"Fifty, with the bridgework, my dear young woman," he said, the words
+swimming in the oil of his suavity.
+
+"You said twenty-five."
+
+"You misunderstood, my dear young woman. Twenty-five would not pay for
+the amount of gold I used. Fifty is what I said. Fifty dollars," his
+voice rising.
+
+She looked her despair.
+
+"I--It's not honorable. I asked you distinctly. What if I haven't it to
+spare--"
+
+"That is not my business," he replied, his entire manner roughening up.
+"You have forty dollars' worth of my gold in your mouth and the law
+provides for receiving goods you can't pay for. You've got it, all
+right, and if you haven't, from the look of you, there is some one
+behind you who has."
+
+She colored so furiously that her eyes smarted to tears as she reached
+down into her blouse for the little chamois bag.
+
+"Give me fifty dollars," she said, cramming the five five-dollar bills
+back into her purse, holding a crisp new hundred-dollar bill out to him,
+her voice as fluttering as a broken wing; "but nothing--nothing will
+ever convince me that you have not taken advantage of me."
+
+He counted her fifty dollars off his own roll, all the more suave.
+
+"You will find you have made a mistake, my dear young woman. This is a
+strictly one-price office. Now I will take out that temporary filling
+and finish you up."
+
+She was loath to mount the chair, except that the nerve was jumping
+again. For half an hour she lay under his touch; finally, as he fumbled
+to untie the bib-like towel about her neck, his lips descended so close
+to her cheek that she could feel their cold, liver-colored caress touch
+her finally in a kiss. She sprang to her feet, jerking the towel away
+from her neck and rubbing it across the defiled spot.
+
+"How dare you! You cheat! You miserable creature! How dare you! You come
+near me and I'll call the police. Let me out of here! Out!"
+
+She ran from the place with her hat in her hand, across the street, and
+up two flights to her room. Panting and drenched with perspiration, all
+day she lay on the little iron bed, her face to the wall, shuddering.
+
+"O God, where are you driving me? What are you driving me on for? Where?
+Why? What does it mean?"
+
+At dusk, with a sense of weakness entirely new to her, she rose to
+undress, resting after each discarded piece of clothing.
+
+She could hear Mrs. McMurtrie passing through the outer hall, a tin
+bucket, on one of its frequent errands to Joe's place across the street,
+grating against the wall. The room took on a deeper and soupy color of
+twilight, the great pachyderm of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital casting
+its shadow.
+
+Suddenly, one of those boltlike perceptions that can spring out
+apparently from space, Lilly clapped her hands to her throat, her
+breast, the back of her neck. Her bag, the little chamois bag, and the
+pink ribbon at her neck were gone! She shook through her clothing in a
+frenzy of haste; she tore each piece inside out; slapped her hands over
+the washstand; flung back her mattress, plunging her fingers into every
+imaginable crevice. Dragged out the bed; jerked up the tacks from the
+carpet, turning back the corners; felt along the dark, narrow halls and
+down two flights on her hands and knees; shook out her clothing again.
+The hair came down over her shoulders and her reasoning seemed to go.
+
+That hand fumbling to untie that bib-towel. Those pointed whiskers
+approaching her cheek. The little pink bow at her neck. Those liverlike
+lips. That soft, boneless hand at the back of her neck had jerked out
+the bag! O God! that soft, slimy kiss and the little jerk of the bow at
+the back of her neck! and fell down with a screaming that brought Mrs.
+McMurtrie.
+
+At noon of the next day Lilly Penny lay in the public ward of the Hanna
+Larchmont Lying-in Hospital, a premature mother by some weeks.
+
+Lilly Penny, whose trousseau had included twelve of the sheerest batiste
+ones, in a coarse, unbleached nightdress not her own and the least
+gentle to her flesh she had ever known.
+
+There was a row of her of which she was the whitest; wan women, big-eyed
+with pain, who had gone down into the canons of death that there
+might be life.
+
+She had a slow, vagarious notion that all of the cots were tilted, so
+that they appeared each on a cross, these mothers. It was sad to lie
+there in that etheric world, yet somehow pleasant. The frieze on the
+auditorium of the St. Louis Center High School was unaccountably before
+her. It was still sown with lilies, but with babies' heads for calyxes.
+Her mother, her teeth set with effort, was scrubbing something. A window
+sill? Who was calling? Mamma--Flora. You wouldn't give 'em up after you
+got 'em, but: it's a wise girl that'll think twice. She felt so white.
+Never, in fact, had she enjoyed such a sense of her whiteness. She held
+up her arm to regard the column of it, and wanted to laugh, but it was
+easier to cry.
+
+They brought her child. Hers, Lilly Becker Penny's. A huge tray of them,
+like a vender's street-corner offering of spring flowers. Tiny human
+blooms with a tag at each wrist. Incredible!
+
+"Three guesses," said the nurse, through a smile, and held out the human
+bouquet toward her. She could scarcely breathe. She wanted to scream, to
+draw up the sheet over her head. To suffocate. Herself, external to
+herself, was breathing out there--off somewhere in that tray. She tried
+to pull up the covers over her head. A hand would draw them away. There
+was a black one in that row of little pink nubs of humanity! Heads like
+hard-boiled eggs not quite cooked through. No! No! No!
+
+Suddenly Lilly raised to her elbow. The second from the end! The big
+head. The full-blown spring-tight curls! The color of honey. The blue
+eyes that were almost ready to turn gray. The tag on the wrist. Number
+two. The tag of her own unbleached gown? Number two!
+
+"Give me!" cried Lilly, on a sudden mounting note that left a little
+resonance like a plucked violin string.
+
+"Right the first time," cried the nurse, lifting the second from the
+end, "and a little beauty she is."
+
+That little living ball of head in the crotch of her arm! She leaned
+forward to the flameless heat of it, her lips moving and wanting
+to speak.
+
+"What is it, dear?" asked the nurse.
+
+She moved them again, but still silently.
+
+The nurse bent lower, her ear to the pillow.
+
+"Now what is it, dear? Say it again."
+
+This time through the veil of a whisper she could hear quite clearly:
+
+"Zoe."
+
+
+
+
+Book Two
+
+
+THE GRAPE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+There were vagrant little streams of water, released by thaw, hurrying
+along against the curbs of Second Avenue, the absolutely impeccable
+spring day that Lilly Penny walked out of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital
+into the warm scented bath of its sunshine, a blanketed bundle in the
+crook of her arm that mysteriously seemed to animate the nap of the
+wool, lifting it and suggesting the little life it enfolded.
+
+She felt strangely light and giddy that life could have gone clattering
+on outside those dim weeks of hers inside the walls.
+
+She had gone down in a dark, a fantastic hiatus in her scheme of things,
+and it was incredible that out here were street cars still clanging for
+right of way, pedestrians weaving in and out the great tapestry of a
+city day, factory whistles splitting asunder with terrific cleavage the
+fore--from the afternoon. There was a hurdy-gurdy rattling tinnily
+through the morning that must have played on uninterruptedly through
+this strange demise of hers.
+
+School children, the air raucous with them, sped home for luncheon
+through streets that already smelled of sun on asphalt. She had never
+really noticed them before. That little fat girl with the braids. How
+pretty to loop them up that way behind each ear with bright red bows.
+She pressed against the little warm life at her bosom. She felt throaty
+with laughter, and the tears of a delicious weakness that made her ache
+to lie down somewhere in this sun, close to the soft bearing earth whose
+secret she knew now, and open this bundle. Hers! It was the first moment
+of her actual ownership. Reality was reclaiming her from that unreal
+realm of doctors and nurses and the dozy detached period of her
+convalescence.
+
+She wanted to run with her living loot to some quiet corner and open it
+up. There was a little square of park with a municipal-laid-out bed of
+tulips across the street, but its benches were crowded with humanity,
+like sparrows sunning themselves on a wire, and the winding of its
+asphalt paths swift with the hurry of all the strangely uninterrupted
+world outside.
+
+She hurried toward Seventeenth Street--could have run, in fact, such a
+resurgence of the old vitality was upon her. Before one of the private
+houses a rheumatic-looking oleander was in the supremest moment of its
+full bloom. It lit up the old street as if a bride had donned her veil
+there. Outside the cleaning establishment were two stretchers of lace
+curtains sunning themselves against the wall.
+
+Lilly hurried up the stoop and pulled out the bell that rang dimly in
+one of those subterranean retreats peculiar to landladies.
+
+Mrs. McMurtrie herself opened the door, as usual her great hands
+steaming and swollen with suds.
+
+"Well?" she said, her arm immediately flung up to the virago's akimbo
+and her foot sliding in between the door.
+
+In an agony of anxiety over possible exclusion, Lilly's words came so
+fast they hardly allowed for the coherence of spacing.
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. McMurtrie? I've returned and I'm fine. I'm so
+sorry about that--that night and the trouble I must have caused you.
+Thank you for sending my bag after me. It's a girl. She's the best
+little thing, Mrs. McMurtrie. Doesn't cry at all. I'll only be wanting
+her with me for a few days until I can get her placed somewhere near me,
+so I can spend evenings and Sundays with her. I've such plans! I'm ready
+to take a position again and forge right ahead. If I might have the old
+room, Mrs. McMurtrie, I promise you that you won't know she's in the
+house these few days. It won't mean one thing in the way of extras for
+you, but I'm willing to pay more. Nothing except a little alcohol stove,
+and if your little girl could watch her for an hour or two once in a
+while, when I'm out, I'll pay her, too. Gladly. My bag is at the
+hospital. I'll send for it--"
+
+"Be saving your breath," cried Mrs. McMurtrie, flinging her gesture
+upward with a cluck of the fingers. "I wouldn't give that for your yarn!
+You're a hussy, from the looks of the whole business, and I've a mind to
+be suing the railroad station for the sending of you to me. You
+mentioned the husband of your own free will. Your husband! Faith, and
+not so much as a relation turning up to be with you in your trouble.
+Husband! You'd better be going and telling that to the Home for Indigent
+Girls. Your husband! Bah!"
+
+To a door slammed full in her face Lilly stood there for a stunned
+instant, hugging at her bundle. She would have liked to crumple up, to
+have felt the earth open and drag her down to a merciful oblivion, but
+after a while she turned and walked down those steps, fumbling with her
+free hand for an address she had applied for at the hospital information
+desk, against possible emergency.
+
+The slip of paper read Nineteenth Street, almost in a straight line
+from where she stood. It was a morose, lean building, only two windows
+wide and five stories high, with a porcelain sign above the bell,
+"ROOMS." A wrinkled pod of a woman opened the door.
+
+"I'm looking for a room for myself alone except for a few days until I
+get my baby placed--"
+
+"Nothing," answered on the click of a closed door.
+
+With her lips almost ludicrously lifted to stimulate the crescent of a
+smile, Lilly descended. There were passers-by and one or two of them
+turned for another glance, and more than ever she kept the smile
+looped up.
+
+Then she instituted a campaign down one side and up the other of two
+blocks of Nineteenth Street. Finally there came a whimper from the
+depths of the blanket, and a light and coughy little cry against and
+into her heart.
+
+She stood on the corner, arguing with herself for a clear brain, the
+easy fatigue of weakness beginning to descend and a queer unsteadiness
+of limb setting in.
+
+"Don't lose your head, Lilly," she admonished of self. "There is a way,
+only you haven't yet struck it. Don't let your brain feel trapped. Keep
+cool. Quiet. Dove. Peace. Cathedral. Sweet and low. Sweet and low.
+Neugass. No. Gertrude Kirk. No, no! If only Mrs. McMurtrie--Indigent
+Girls--No--no--no!"
+
+However, after a while she did turn back through toward Second Avenue,
+her feet quickened with a destination she could not bring herself to
+admit, and so she loitered, inquiring at three more front doors which
+had now come to have an angry scowl for her as she mounted their
+front steps.
+
+Between a Home for Lithuanian Aged and a Swedish bakery and lunch room
+that she had more than once frequented, a black-and-gold sign spanned
+what at one time had been the noncommittal front of a stately
+residence--"Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls."
+
+Ascending these steps, she could feel the glance of every passer-by
+boring into the very back of her head, awls crawling through and through
+her. She tried to drag her hat down over her eyes. Her black velvet
+sailor, modish enough when new, had suffered somewhat in the hurried
+packing off of her things after her. The buckram rim, misshapen from too
+close quarters, flared rather outlandishly off her face, so that after
+she had pulled the bell she stood with her back to the sidewalk, while
+the sign above seared into her.
+
+Induced by the warmth of the day and the bundle of blanket she carried,
+a pox of perspiration had burst out on her face, but the little
+whimperings against her heart had died down so that she dared not risk
+the jolt of reaching for her handkerchief.
+
+She was admitted finally into one of the large salon parlors that had
+lost its beauty as a woman can lose hers. Stripped of the jewels of
+crystal chandeliers, long mirrors, and glittering floors, it remained
+now a gaunt strip of room, divided by a low fence and swinging gate into
+office and waiting room.
+
+There were long windows that looked out upon the polyglot of Second
+Avenue, which even then, over a not quite abandoned elegance, was
+donning its Joseph's coat of seventeen nationalities and dining,
+bartering, and gesticulating in as many languages.
+
+On a strip of bench between the windows Lilly sat and waited.
+
+The movement of the room coagulated about the figure of a woman seated
+at a desk on the office side of the partition. Girls, to Lilly it seemed
+a whole phantasmagoria of identical ones with short hair and eyes none
+too young, passed in and out of the little swinging gate. Suddenly it
+struck her, with such a wrench that she almost cried out, that here was
+no illusion. They were uniformed, these girls. In dark-blue cotton
+stuff, with three rows of white tape running around the skirt hem and
+white bone buttons up the back. Through the doorway one of them was
+washing down a flight of stairs, raising a cold, soap-and-lye smell.
+Another, with a splay smile that was terrible as a wound, wiped in and
+out among the spokes of the banisters, her face as without muscle as a
+squeezed orange, and smiling without knowing that it smiled.
+
+Sitting there with her bundle closer and closer to her heart, Lilly
+closed her eyes to that smile.
+
+Above all, she knew that she needed to keep clear, and yet across the
+swept horizon she tried to create, silhouettes of thought such as these
+would move, fantastic as cloud shapes.
+
+"Who am I?" And then, with her old untrained probing after reality: "How
+do I know I am not dreaming? Where am I going? What is it I want? How
+terrible! Me, Lilly Becker. This place is like the poorhouse at home,
+that time the High School sociology class visited it. Zoe, are you real?
+Mine alone! Not his. Mine. You must be the miracle and show me the way,
+Zoe. You shall be me plus everything that I am not. To have missed the
+ecstasy of you is not to have lived. If Auchinloss could hear me now.
+Who knows? I may, yet. What if I am like Joan of Arc, heeding a vision,
+only I don't know which way the vision is pointing. Funny. Oh, but I'm
+going to clear the way for you, Zoe. No Chinese shoes for your little
+feet or your little brain. Free--to choose--to be! That's the way I'll
+rear my daughter. My daughter! Queer I never think of him, her father.
+Zoe--what if you don't want to be saved from what I'm saving you. The
+fatness--the sedentary spirit of--out there. But you are me plus
+everything that I am not. You will want to be saved. You will."
+
+It was out of this limbo that Lilly was finally summoned, through the
+little swing door to an empty chair beside the desk.
+
+She thought she had never beheld such eyes as were turned upon her
+through polished eyeglasses with the complement of a wide black-ribbon
+guard. They were the color of slate and cleaned for impression. The
+eight cases that had preceded Lilly were gone from them just as the
+eight cases to follow would erase one by one.
+
+"Sit down," she said. Then, "Girl or boy?"
+
+"Girl."
+
+"Name?"
+
+"Zoe. Oh, you mean my name? Let me explain. You must understand that I
+am not--indigent. I am looking for a room. I've just come out of the
+hospital with my little one, and you have no idea how difficult it is to
+find lodging where there is a child."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"I--I must beg of you not to--to take an attitude toward--"
+
+"If you want me to help you, my dear, you must trust me. What is your
+name?"
+
+"Lilly. Your files won't help you. I'm not on record--that way. Lilly
+Parlow for professional reasons, but I want her christened by her full
+family name--"
+
+"What is your family name?"
+
+"Why, Lilly--Becker--Penny."
+
+"Your last address?"
+
+"You mean?"
+
+"Where did you sleep last night?"
+
+"I told you. Hanna Larchmont Hospital. I received my discharge to-day."
+
+"Is the father of your child your lawful husband?"
+
+"Indeed, yes!"
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Out West--where I came from."
+
+"Exactly where?"
+
+"D-d-denver, I think."
+
+"Why are you here and he there?"
+
+"Oh, you mustn't question me like this! I left him of my own free will,
+after I found I had made a mistake. I am not asking anything of you. I
+can pay. I want a room for me and my baby, for a few days until I get
+her placed. I can make certain arrangements for her and take up my
+work again."
+
+"What is your work?"
+
+"I am a singer."
+
+"Where are your friends?"
+
+"I have none."
+
+"You are quite sure that this man whom you call your husband--"
+
+"I won't be talked to in that tone."
+
+"Of course, you realize that you are a highly specialized case."
+
+"Do these institutions merely function as machines? Is no provision made
+for the exception? Rent me a room for me and my baby. I will pay you in
+advance. See, I have five five-dollar bills in my purse. I must have a
+place to sleep and I won't leave here unless you forcibly eject me. I
+must have my luggage; it is still at the hospital."
+
+"How is it they did not help you there to make further provision for--"
+
+"I didn't explain. It seemed inconceivable that I could not find
+immediately lodgings."
+
+"I see," said Lilly's interrogator, with the air of seeing not at all.
+"Your case does not come under our kind of jurisdiction. Our girls are
+unfortunate mothers who are cared for here until such time as
+arrangements can be made to place the child. But no girl is entitled to
+our nursery and infirmary service for more than four consecutive weeks,
+and then, as I said, only in the event of unfortunate motherhood."
+
+"Can only the unmarried mother be unfortunate?"
+
+"I hardly care to discuss with you the wisdom of our policies."
+
+"But you must," cried Lilly, now thoroughly beside herself. "What about
+the girl who would rather fight out her own destiny than live through
+the miserable and immoral--yes, immoral--process of a marriage that she
+realizes has been a mistake? Is there no provision for the woman who
+hasn't a man-made grievance against society? Who simply wants her
+one-hundred-per-cent-right to live? Women are coming to demand it more
+and more, that right! I venture to say that ten years from now they will
+be voting themselves that right. Now we're like a lot of half-hatched
+chickens pecking through the shell. I've pecked through! My daughter may
+live to see them all pecked through."
+
+"Really, I can't see--"
+
+"To-day a woman on her own with a child has only one meaning. I've been
+treated like a leper. Suppose, for argument, my child hadn't had a
+legitimate father. All the more reason a hand should have been held out
+to us. But I'm not asking anything. A night's lodging, madam, for which
+I can pay. Here it is in advance. I'm not going to leave!"
+
+The child was whimpering now lustily and wanting to lift its little body
+from the long confinement of wrappings. There were tears and anger and a
+brilliant sort of challenge in Lilly's voice and in her glance that
+seemed to dart and glance off the starchy shirt waist of the figure
+behind the desk. She sat clicking her pencil against her teeth, eyes
+averted, as if to galvanize herself against a personality that dared to
+intrude itself through a "case."
+
+She openly regarded her work, this Miss Letitia Scullen, who was one day
+to lay down her life valiantly enough at the altar of typhus in
+war-stricken Rumania, as an exact science. Indigency, like typhus, was a
+pandemic which must ultimately respond to an antitoxin. It was as if her
+forty-seven charges were sick, and she reading the blood test of
+indigency, prescribing in toto.
+
+"If you are what you say you are, then you are not entitled to the
+benefits of this home. Our girls here receive absolutely collective
+treatment along lines worked out for their general needs. Your case is
+an isolated one. You are not in need."
+
+"But please, please, please, is there no need except that covered by
+vice? Can you not conceive of a plight being all the worse because there
+is no provision for it?"
+
+"It is unthinkable that a woman like you, of evident refinement and
+education, should find herself in the predicament you describe."
+
+"Then thank God for being a rebel, if it will make you ponder on what is
+new, untried, and not according to formula. There are only two kinds of
+women you social workers recognize. The sheltered ones and the
+unfortunates. What about the woman who is neither, but merely out on her
+own? I try to meet life as an individual and not as a woman. What
+happens? Doors slam in my face. I can't buy a night's lodging for the
+child in my arms. It sounds like a thirty-cent melodrama. And now you,
+whose life study is life--I tell you I won't be turned off. You must
+take me in."
+
+"It's very irregular."
+
+"I'll pay."
+
+"We don't accept paying inmates. You may make the institution a present
+if you so desire. I'll put you up in the infirmary--it happens to be
+empty; and you may have the use of the nursery equipment adjoining, and
+there is a practical nurse in the house. Understand that this is
+entirely outside the regulations of the institution and I must ask you
+to make different arrangements as soon as possible."
+
+"Thank you," said Lilly, ashamed to be grateful and the tears pressing
+against her eyeballs. "Oh, my dear, thank you! Thank you!"
+
+And so it came about that in a room of five white cots and three barred
+windows, with the aid of a practical nurse and a tiny gas stove on a tin
+mat, Lilly prepared her daughter for the night.
+
+In her bag, lugged over from the hospital by one of the uniformed girls,
+was the little layout, parting gift of the institution, including a
+machine-stitched flannelet nightdress that Lilly could have wept over
+as she fastened the thick button at the throat.
+
+Still, with the chapped-faced nurse moving about the bare, ugly room on
+her everlasting mission of efficiency, diluting the formula to just the
+proportion required, rubbing the little bud of a body with coarse
+cornstarch, the sense of ownership did not descend upon Lilly.
+
+She wanted to feel this new estate of hers. In all the three and a half
+weeks there had never been a moment of privacy, to give reality to this
+pink-and-blue-and-yellow bloom that had somehow flowered from the tree
+of her being.
+
+She wanted the quiet to reconcile this new, this terrible, this
+throat-throbbing sweetness with the Medean fury which had flung her, a
+shuddering, choking mass upon that rooming-house floor. She wanted to
+feel again and again the quick, ecstatic brash that could race in a wave
+over her when she held this warm rose of life to her breast.
+
+At just before nine there was a wordless round of inspection from the
+white starched shirt waist surmounted with the spectacles and the
+black-ribbon guard, a final look-in from the nurse whose face was
+Swedishly blond and pink from chapping, a bottle of milk placed in the
+small refrigerator, and the little bundle on the pillow covered with an
+extra thickness of murky blanket.
+
+At nine o'clock the lights went out just as Lilly had slid into her own
+gown. She tiptoed to the door, barefooted, locking it and thereby
+violating a rule of the institution. There must have been a moon
+somewhere behind housetops, because through the three shadeless windows
+a sort of gleam whitely powdered the silence.
+
+She was suddenly full of fear there in the darkness and the aloneness,
+and ran over to the cot for the miracle of that soft body to her flesh.
+She lifted it from the nest of coarse pillow, even in sleep the tendril
+of a little finger closing about hers.
+
+There were crisscross shadows on the floor, cast there by the iron bars
+at the windows. Her child lay asleep in an institutional garb of
+charity. The father of that child, ignorant of its very existence, was
+at that moment, and at a distance of one thousand miles, adjusting a new
+rubber stopper to the bathtub in the home he shared with his
+parents-in-law.
+
+On one of the empty cots the rather silly silhouette of Lilly's hat, its
+buckram rim sadly broken, persisted through the gloom. Her shoes, in a
+little attitude of waiting beside a chair, lopped slightly of a
+tipsiness induced by run-over heels. In the jumble of changing hands the
+black valise of her underwear, handkerchiefs, and baby garments had
+disappeared, so her little washed-out chemise, quite dainty, hung drying
+over a table edge.
+
+Outside the Home for Indigent Girls a city that took absolutely no
+reckoning of Lilly wove its pattern toward another to-morrow.
+
+She was alone with the first realization of her child, in a moment that
+might have shaped itself to crush her. She felt a throbbing that seemed
+to make a rush for her throat. She sat down on the bed, leaning over
+until her body formed a sort of cave about the child. She had a sense of
+the power to strangle both their lives out there in that strange
+darkness. An old fear leaned out at her.
+
+"Am I mad?"
+
+More and more the sense of wanting to strangle flowed over her.
+
+"Here--to-night--now!"
+
+A cry leaped up under her pressure, startled, and with a stab of pain in
+it.
+
+She swooped the little squirming burden up under her chin; she buried
+her head into the warm froth of curls, the light wind of her laughter
+suddenly sweeping the room.
+
+"Mother's darling! Twiddle-de-darling. Moonlit flake! Beautifulest.
+Zoeist flower in the world. Mine alone! Alone mine! Oodle-de-dums.
+To-morrow! To-morrow!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There followed for Lilly a week of scars, each exactly as deep as the
+day was long.
+
+First, the heartbreaking business of giving over her child to the
+chappy-faced nurse and a rear room of nursery hung in the odors of
+formaldehyde and lined up into a ward of white iron cribs, each screened
+in with a clothes horse of little flannel garments of a thickness that
+wrung Lilly's heart.
+
+There were now two additional occupants--a poor, top-heavy infant with a
+fourteen-year-old mother, father unknown, and the teething baby of one
+of the blue-uniformed inmates whose routine allowed her periods of the
+day to nurstle her child.
+
+That was the wrench that began each day. To abandon the pink-and-white
+bloom that slept all night without crying in the cove of her arm, to the
+grayness of a nursery that should have been pink and white and sweetly
+fragrant with powders and puffs and the rosy kind of tufted coverlets
+with scent between them that her mother had once sewn over with bowknots
+for the Kemble baby.
+
+She was guilty of extravagances that ate menacingly into the four
+remaining five-dollar bills. Against the protests of the practical
+nurse she promptly discarded the long muslin swaddling dress, whose
+superfluous length wound around the little feet, purchasing three short
+and sheer ones, also a doll-size toilet set painted in little clumps of
+forget-me-nots. The hair brush had a thick, soft nap which would spin
+out her child's curls into a cloud of gold. They really were the color,
+these curls, of a jar of strained honey seen through sunlight. It was as
+if she could never tire of feeling them wind to her finger.
+
+The nurse she kept placated with tips in outlandish proportion to her
+funds, and often a memory of that dip of lip curving terrifyingly across
+her consciousness would scurry homeward to this gray-and-black abode of
+theirs, which only contained them on a tolerance that day after day
+seared deeply into her being.
+
+Slowly but surely her none too immaculately shod feet ceased their
+pilgrimages to the agencies. She did apply one sultry morning in answer
+to an advertisement for a "refined indoor entertainer, city work," only
+to find the usual fee exhortation thinly backed by promises. For the
+most part she marked off at her breakfast table in the adjoining Swedish
+lunch room, under the newspaper heading, "Help Wanted, Female," the
+demands for stenographers, companions, hat models, and, on one occasion,
+for a cashier's vacancy in a Madison Avenue florist's.
+
+A persistent streak of circumstances seemed to prohibit her success.
+Upon three occasions it happened that she waited all morning in a line,
+only to see the applicant directly in front of her chosen for the
+position. At the florist's shop, bond was required. A lawyer in the
+Flatiron Building asked her to type a specimen letter for him, and laid
+heavy lips on the curl at the nape of her neck as she bent to his
+dictation. R.L. Ginsburg, of the Ginsburg-Flatow Millinery Company,
+engaged her services, and kissed her squarely on the lips to seal
+the bargain.
+
+The straight line of those lips had undeniably softened. She walked
+about with them usually moist and slightly open, and the arch of her
+brows very high. She had softened ineffably, like a ripened fruit; was
+more liable to the backward glance of the passer-by.
+
+During these days that were lifting now, each its frankly lashing tail
+of terror, there were smiles all along the way for Lilly--old faces
+smiling at and young faces with her, often to the assuagement of the
+tightening knot of terror at her heart.
+
+With her trick of mind that could close itself against any concern
+beyond her immediate future, her one burning desire was for a
+competency, to be earned preferably at stenography, since that would
+leave her evenings free, and which would tide her over these first weeks
+of difficult readjustment. To find and afford for this amazing liability
+of hers the kind of temporary asylum that would set her free for the
+scheming out of her new cosmos.
+
+She found out, at the instance of the practical nurse, a sort of
+semi-private institution on Columbus Avenue, but a trip through the
+wards and nurseries sickened her. There was a score of little blue
+gingham dresses, dingy fabrics that seemed to darken childhood, flapping
+on a rear clothes line, and one two-year-old child lay asleep on a step,
+his little white frock, with black anchors printed into it, furiously
+smeared, and one hand clutching a sticky gingersnap.
+
+She did not even inquire further, but got out quickly, trembling.
+
+The proprietor of the Swedish bakery gave her an address of a Mrs.
+Landman, a practical nurse who might consent to board the infant of an
+employed parent. So on the very day of the lawyer's encounter there was
+another sickening journey to what proved to be a tenement in West
+Fifty-third Street. The newel post to the entrance was defaced with
+obscene handwriting, the hallways were like cellars, and there was a
+sign in the window, "Madam Landman, Midwife."
+
+She did not linger to ring the bell, but worked her way downtown again,
+toward the lawyer's office _via_ the florist's establishment, always
+with an eye to minimum car fare.
+
+That night she lay awake the night through. Another bed in the infirmary
+was occupied. One of the girls had spilled scalding tea along her arm,
+and all night to her groanings Lilly lay staring into the darkness, her
+child so in the cove of her arm that its slight breathing fanned
+her flesh.
+
+It was one of those long, calculating nights full of alternatives no
+sooner contrived than rejected. Only one state of surety came
+crystalline out of it.
+
+There was no going back.
+
+Twice she rose and, with much of her old revulsion curiously gone,
+greased the scalded arm by the puny aid of a night light that flowed in
+from the hall when the door was opened.
+
+At five o'clock her child began a lusty paean to the dawn. She heated
+the milk and held the warm bottle tilted until it was emptied with the
+strong, deep draughts that delighted her. There was distinctly more gold
+out day by day in the ringlets, and the eyes were turning gray and
+could fill blackly with pupil.
+
+After that Lilly sat in her nightdress beside the window, her eagerness
+for the day allayed to an extent by her rising sense of panic. She tried
+to lay her despair. Unthinkable that this new day, dawning so pinkly
+over chimney pots, would not prove itself a friend in her great need. By
+eight-thirty, at the instance of a newspaper advertisement, she was the
+first applicant at the Acme Publishing Company, East Twenty-third
+Street, a narrow five-story building with ground-floor offices and a
+tremor through it from the champ of presses.
+
+She obtained this time from a woman who accepted her lack of reference
+rather negligibly.
+
+She, too, asked her to compose a specimen letter acknowledging receipt
+of a translator's manuscript. She accomplished it with a glibness that
+brought a flush to her cheek and a smile to the face of her employer.
+
+Lilly thought she had never beheld such spick-and-span efficiency as
+this woman's. The smooth white hair arranged with a conservative eye to
+the prevailing mode. The clean, untired skin and rather large, able
+hands. She made mental note of the crisp organdie collar and cuffs, and
+was suddenly conscious that her shoes were too short of vamp, and her
+heels run down because they were too high. A revulsion of taste flowed
+over Lilly; she hated suddenly the rather tawdry cape piped in red, and
+mentally retailored herself with a new feeling for simplicity.
+
+Her sinkage of heart at the proffered eight dollars a week was followed
+by a quick resurgence of vitality at the prospect of the
+advancement held out.
+
+Her predecessor was being promoted to first reader!
+
+_The Paradise Trail_, a best seller of the moment, had been written in
+those same offices during spare moments of one of the proof readers.
+
+The Acme Publishing Company printed paperback editions of translations
+from the more highly papriked of current French novels. The instinct to
+write rose in Lilly, the quick flame of her faddism easily aroused. Here
+was nothing more than a stroke of fate. A long-laid plan for a novel
+lifted, an entire panorama of resolutions dramatizing themselves.
+
+The easy hours from nine to four. Long evenings at work beside the crib.
+A _nom de plume_, of course--Ann something. Ann Netherland. But eight
+dollars! Her heart tightened.
+
+She had obtained, the day previous, at a Lexington Avenue Children's
+Hospital she chanced to pass, the address of an institution at Spuyten
+Duyvil said to be conducted for the children of professional parents,
+and conducted by Minnie Dupree, an old stock actress remembered by the
+generation preceding Lilly's for the heavier Shakespearean roles. Her
+mind leaped to this. Yes, she would return at two o'clock, ready to
+begin work, and went out into a day warm with sunshine.
+
+A quick resolve formed itself. She inquired at some length in a corner
+drug store, finally taking a train for Spuyten Duyvil, and fifteen
+minutes later descended to a little station upon the edge of a park that
+was brilliant with new green.
+
+More inquiry, the disdaining of a cab, and a twenty minutes' walk along
+curving asphalt walks with houses far enough back to lose their
+identities among trees. A sense of summer and hope swept her.
+
+The Dupree place was an old homestead of painted gray brick and ugly
+with the millwork and gable bulging wall and tower of American
+architecture in most horrific mood, but a smooth green lawn fell
+plushily away from it on four sides and it was all Lilly could do to
+keep from running up the walk. Her child in the sweet air of this fine
+old spot! Out of her eight dollars a week she could manage four, even
+five if need be! Her embarrassment was only temporary. Any arrears
+incurred she could make up later if only it could be arranged.
+
+There were long, cool halls, a sun-flooded kindergarten, an open-air
+playroom on the roof, and a white-enameled nursery with a row of
+ducklings waddling across the walls, and Mrs. Dupree herself, who
+stopped at each stair landing for ready and copious explanation.
+
+She was very corseted, very mannered, and quick to attitudinize. A
+flight of framed photographs of her followed the staircase upward step
+by step, in which she registered at a considerably younger period such
+staple states as Anger, Meditation, Humiliation, Vengeance, Love.
+
+She was still a commanding figure with copper-colored hair that for ten
+years had wanted to turn gray, a face of furiously combated wrinkles,
+and eyes deep with black or blackened lashes.
+
+She was the declamatory kind of Lady Macbeth who had stepped into the
+role flatly on a No. 7 last, rather than from a Juliette who had
+fattened into the part; that congenial stateliness now thrown completely
+out of plumb by a violent limp, which, resulting from a railway
+accident, threw out her entire left leg as she walked.
+
+All the velvet was unconsciously out in Lilly's voice coping with the
+Dupree extravagance of manner.
+
+"Do you accept them as young as four weeks, Mrs. Dupree?"
+
+"Bless you, dearie, the three weeks' duckie darling of Cissie de Veaux
+is our youngest at present."
+
+"The comic-opera Cissie de Veaux?"
+
+"Why, honey child, Cissie tells it on herself, she never would have had
+those ducky twins of hers five years ago if she hadn't known there was a
+Minnie Dupree Infantary. That is our aim, here, you know. To give the
+child of superior professional parents the most superior environment
+that money can buy."
+
+"How much--"
+
+"Elaine Bringhouse, daughter of Harold Bringhouse. Ever seen him in
+'Hamlet'? Before your time, I guess! Poor Harold in his day was the best
+all-around Hamlet in the country. Cry! I wish you could have seen that
+child's father cry on Elaine's fifth birthday. We don't keep them over
+five years of age here, you know. Bless her! she's in a road company of
+'Little Miss Muffet' now. Yes, indeedy, dearie, that's a book of
+testimonials there on that table from my children's parents. I take it
+you're a professional, dearie?"
+
+"Oh yes--yes. Concert and--vaudeville."
+
+"I'm a retired member of the profession myself. A little before your
+time, bless you, but ask anyone who remembers the Manhattan Stock
+Company about Minnie Dupree. Why, I played Lady Macbeth opposite Claude
+Melrose when he was making thirty dollars a week in Fredericksburg
+Stock. Did he use my cutting of the banquet scene all those years after
+he struck Broadway? He did. Did he give credit where credit was due? He
+did not. Oh, my dear, I could tell you tales! The dirt I've had spun me
+in my day. Maybe Minnie Dupree never saw Broadway, but dirt! If there is
+so much as a speck on my name, God strike me dead. You voice, dearie?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah, voice! Ask anyone who knew me in the Manhattan Stock if they
+remember Minnie Dupree in 'The Silver Lute.' Donald Deland as fine a
+Macbeth as ever strode the boards! That's his picture there as Iago.
+I'll show you his little grandchild up in the nursery. 'Min,' he used to
+say, 'if you'll throw over Edward Dupree, I'll give you a year's voice
+training at the academy and put you up against Melba.' Ah, my dear, I
+hope yours is a happy one."
+
+"How much--"
+
+"I threw away a career for the caprice of a man who cast me off like an
+old glove. Be careful, dearie. Here in the Infantary we never ask
+questions of parents, believing it the right of everyone to work it out
+her own way, but look twice before you leap in this life, dearie. I
+could tell you tales! The dirt I've been spun!"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Dupree, what a sunny, lovely nursery! How happy I would be if
+my little girl could come to you here."
+
+"My people want the best, dearie, and I give it to them. I've put the
+last ten years of my life, since the accident, dearie, to making this
+home one the profession can be proud of. My nurses and doctors are the
+best. We only accept them from two weeks of age to five years, but look
+over that album of testimonials--"
+
+"Oh, this bright, lovely nursery is sufficient--"
+
+"Look, at that one! Ever see such a flower? God love it, that's Esther
+Deland. Her mother's playing Canada. And this is little Sidonia
+Vavasour--mother out in one of the highest-priced sketches in
+vaudeville. Know it? 'The Snake.' Every morning that God sends comes her
+good-morning telegram to this little mite, just as regular as
+clockwork."
+
+"I hope, Mrs. Dupree, it isn't going to be too expensive."
+
+"Our service divides itself into three classifications, Mrs. ----?"
+
+"Penny."
+
+"Not Alonzo Penny of the old Trenton Stock?"
+
+"No. You were saying, Mrs. Dupree, three classifications?"
+
+"Yes, I'll give you a booklet, dearie. The rates vary according to age.
+Up to one, then one to three, and three to five. We've our own cows,
+sterilizing machines--"
+
+"How much did you say, Mrs. Dupree, up to one year?"
+
+"Six hundred dollars a year, in quarterly advance payments."
+
+They were down again in the wide, cool hallway, little kindergarten
+voices of children shrilling through from one of the playrooms.
+
+A white nurse passed them, tilting a white perambulator down a flight of
+white stone stairs.
+
+"Six hundred dollars a year. That--that would make one hundred and fifty
+dollars--in advance," said Lilly, trying to keep the muscles of her face
+from quivering.
+
+"Right, dearie."
+
+"I--why--I--I'm afraid--"
+
+"No hurry, dearie. Think it over. It just happens we have a bed on the
+infant floor right now, so I'd make up my mind right quickly if I were
+you. Think it over. You know best."
+
+Out on the sun-swept lawn, the white perambulator and the white nurse
+just ahead, Lilly broke into a run. Tears were beating up against her
+throat and there was a knot of sobs behind her breathing. She wanted to
+throw herself on the warm slope of terrace and kick into it. That vision
+of that large bone button at the throat of that little muslin nightgown
+somehow became the symbol of all her misery!
+
+After a while she dropped down on a little grassy knoll just off the
+curving sidewalk, and leaned her head against a tree, large tears, since
+there was no one to see them, rolling unheeded down her cheeks toward an
+inverted crescent of bitterly disappointed mouth.
+
+The sun at her back must have acted as a sedative, because, after a
+while of crying there tiredly, she started up out of a light doze, all
+her perceptions startled, and began immediately to run back toward the
+station. Within view of it she met a pedestrian, inquiring of him the
+time. Ten minutes before two! This set her to running again, so that she
+fairly flopped with a little collapse on a station bench. A train was
+just pulling out. There was another at two-twenty.
+
+It was ten minutes past three when she burst into the outer offices of
+the Acme Publishing Company, her lips trembling with a prepared apology
+she had hardly the breath for.
+
+An office boy brought her out an immediate message. Her place had been
+filled at five minutes past three.
+
+All the way down Second Avenue she was inclined somehow to laugh. She
+found herself finally in the Swedish bakery and lunch room, ordering,
+without appetite, but with a growing sense of need of food, a dish of
+rice pudding and a cup of coffee. She broke into the only remaining bill
+in her pocket, leaving a five-cent tip beside her saucer, and pouring,
+with quite a little jangling, one dollar and eighty-five cents back into
+her purse.
+
+In the hallway of the Home she encountered Miss Scullen, hurrying with a
+sheaf of papers in her hand.
+
+"Oh yes, Lilly, I want to speak to you."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Have you made different arrangements? You know it is highly irregular
+your remaining on."
+
+"I am expecting to take a position and get baby placed any day now, Miss
+Scullen. I've just returned from Spuyten Duyvil, where I have something
+very good in view. If you could see your way clear to let things run on
+a few days longer, Miss Scullen?"
+
+"Not beyond next Tuesday evening. It is very irregular and I've a board
+of directors' meeting Wednesday."
+
+"Yes, Miss Scullen, not beyond Tuesday evening."
+
+When Lilly entered the infirmary the smell of iodine smote her queerly
+and with an unnamable terror. Her child lay sleeping on a pillow hedged
+in with a chair, and, bending over, the aroma struck her squarely and
+with a close pungency. There was a great yellow stain on the little
+forehead, a welt rising and purpling through it. Even the honey-colored
+curls were stained with a great blotch of the vicious greeny yellow, one
+little eyelid swelling.
+
+With a cry somewhere from the primordial depths of her, Lilly snatched
+up the pillow, rushing with it and its burden to the door, kicking it
+open in a gale of terror, her voice tearing down the hallway.
+
+"Help! For God's sake--quick--help!"
+
+The nurse came rushing with a stack of sheets in her arms, and in an
+instant the corridor was a runway of blue-clad girls, ready, even eager
+for stampede, and finally Miss Scullen herself pushing through.
+
+"My baby! What has happened to her! Quick--my child!"
+
+With immediate realization of the situation, the nurse pushed her
+red-elbowed way through the tightening congestion, her voice strident
+above the dreaded hum of panic.
+
+"Get back to your room. It is nothing. The child fell off the bed and
+bumped its head. Get back, every one of you. I painted the bruise with
+iodine. It's nothing but a bumped head. Back, I say!"
+
+There was a blur before Lilly's eyes that waved like a red flag, and her
+voice shot up to a shriek.
+
+"You've hurt her terribly! You! Devil! Pig! How dared you! You've
+pinched her! too. I know now what those little blue marks are from. Her
+head! Her little eye! I could kill you! Devil! Pig! You let her fall! I
+could kill you!"
+
+Through the snarl of the corridor Miss Scullen emerged, her lips very
+thin and her voice a steady sedative to the rising murmur.
+
+"You get your things and get out! Leave the child, if you want, until
+you find a place, but you get your things. You thankless, ungrateful
+girl. You were taken in here on sufferance and against my better
+judgment. This is the reward which comes from placing myself liable to
+censure from my board of directors. Girls, go back to your rooms at once
+and forget this wayward girl's disgraceful scene. Now you go!"
+
+"Indeed I'll go! But leave my baby here? Not likely! Why, what's one
+baby's brain more or less to you? One case more or less for your filing
+cabinet, that's all. If I were one of these poor girls and found myself
+stuck in one of these places that screams out their indigence above the
+very doorway, dresses them in the blue calico of indigence, and then
+seals and stamps indigence all over them, I'd show you what real
+indigence is, once you insisted upon stamping me with it. But you're not
+going to make an indigent out of my baby. No, you're not! No! No! No!"
+
+She was presently marching down the street with her head high, her eyes
+black with iris, a bag in one hand and the bundle of her child clutched
+under her chin.
+
+She did not heed where she was going, but as she tramped she was saying
+audibly over and over again:
+
+"My baby. My baby. My baby."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+She was not afraid. The blood was rocking in her veins like a sea, and
+she was raging with an anxiety that mounted as the heliotrope dusk,
+turping out sky lines, began to blow in like fog through the narrowness
+of the cross streets.
+
+But neither was she alone. That was the miracle of her state. That
+peculiar living magnetism was through the blanket she carried and in a
+current along her arm. A lusty little storm of crying rose once, quite
+suddenly, and she kissed down into the pink little mouth that was full
+of the breath of life--her life.
+
+There were three bottles of still warm milk in her bag. She fumbled for
+one, kneeling right there on the sidewalk, jerking out the stopper with
+her teeth and fitting on the rubber nipple. The little lips closed over
+it with the pull and strong insuck of breath which never failed to
+thrill her.
+
+She was sobering, though, slowly and surely into a state of panic. At
+Broadway the swirl of the dinner-bound was already tightening. Lights
+began to pop out in the tall, narrow office and loft buildings of the
+vertical city.
+
+She boarded an uptown car, counting, and truly enough, upon the chivalry
+of the mob toward her burden, for obtaining an immediate seat. At West
+Fifty-third Street she alighted into a day gone two shades darker. A
+stiffening breeze blew in from the river, whipping up the odor of
+garbage from curbs. A group of dirty children were building a bonfire
+of some of these slops and bits of flying paper, lending a certain
+vicious redness to the scene.
+
+She thought suddenly of Page Avenue at this hour of pinkish mist. The
+little patch of front porch with the green chairs and tan-linen covers.
+
+"O God, what have I done!"
+
+The window with the midwife's sign was dark and there was a little
+coagulation of bareheaded women on the steps. They parted to give her
+passage, their babel immediately resuming after her.
+
+The hot, sour smells of the hallway smothered her, but she fumbled for
+the bell, plunging her hand into the damp, clinging gauze of a cobweb
+that sent her back shuddering. What proved to be Mrs. Landman herself
+opened the door upon a rushing smell of hops and a cookery and a glimpse
+of violently disordered interior. It was not so much the furiously
+stained figure that sent Lilly a step backward, but a black flap tied
+over one eye and knotted at the back of her head struck her as so
+unutterably sinister that without a word she turned and, with her head
+charging the way for her, ran out through the hallway, through the group
+on the stoop, and the entire length of the block, catching a downtown
+surface car that stopped for her after it had started.
+
+She was palpitating with the kind of fear that gave her a sense of
+fleeing through a dark corridor with some one at her heels, and so rode
+on until her breath caught up and she could relax into a grateful sort
+of inertia.
+
+At Forty-second Street, on a sudden impulse, she left the car, hurrying
+into Grand Central Station. In its undress of semicompletion, the swirl
+of home-going commuters caught her, so that she was swept down a
+temporary runway and shunted finally into the waiting room. At its far
+end the "Matron" sign still hung at right angles. She hurried to it, and
+to her relief was met by a new face above the gray-and-white uniform,
+rather little and old and framed kindly in white. There was a small boy
+asleep on the couch this time, and the usual frowsily tired traveling
+public relaxed against various of the chairs.
+
+"I want to leave my baby here until I get in touch with friends who have
+failed to meet me."
+
+A quick suspicion of foundling crossed the old face.
+
+"We don't take the responsibility of infants."
+
+"But this is urgent. I must locate my friends in Brooklyn. I cannot find
+them in the telephone book and evidently they have not received my
+telegram."
+
+"We don't do it."
+
+Then Lilly went gallantly down to her last handful of change, all but a
+ten-cent piece.
+
+"She's the best little thing. Sleeps the night through. I've two bottles
+of prepared food here in my bag. Her next feeding time is at ten and her
+next at six--"
+
+"We don't keep infants for nothing like that long, madam. I go off duty
+at seven and--"
+
+"I haven't any intention of leaving her that long, just until I get in
+touch with my friends."
+
+With the mound of change ingratiated into the old palm and the little
+bundle transferred to arms more or less reluctantly held out for it,
+Lilly lifted back a corner of the blanket.
+
+"Wait until nice lady sees mother's beautiful, then she'll be glad to
+watch over her."
+
+Mysteriously, it seemed to Lilly, there was nothing of the button nose
+so peculiar to infants about her child. Its was tipped with character;
+so, too, the little mouth in the firm way it had of closing.
+
+"Say, but ain't she a beauty!" capitulated the matron.
+
+"Isn't she! Isn't she!"
+
+"Look at them curls. You ought to enter her in a show, ma'am."
+
+"You will see to her carefully until I return, won't you? She sleeps
+that way always, sweetly and deeply."
+
+"Why, I'll sit and rock her myself this very minute."
+
+When Lilly went out into the darkness there were the ten cents in her
+bag and the blurry outline of things she finally laid to hunger. She
+walked downward for some blocks, finally entering a Third Avenue lunch
+room and ordering a ten-cent bowl of beef stew. She took it from a
+tablespoon like a thick soup, its warmth flowing through her and
+dissipating a chilly discomfort. But her face still felt rather drawn,
+and, regarding herself in the pink net-draped mirror, she took to
+rubbing her cheeks, an old, schoolgirl device against pallor. She was
+quite becomingly large-eyed from the deadly aching tiredness that lay
+over her, but otherwise the old whiteness of her skin flowed unmarred
+and intact, also that unadorned look of nun to her face where the hair
+left it so cleanly.
+
+Beside her at one of the marble-topped tables a great, hefty motorman in
+uniform kept finding out her knee and pressing it.
+
+"Stop it," she said, "or I'll call the proprietor."
+
+He drew surlily back, draining his thick cup of coffee and shambling
+out, chewing a toothpick. At the door he looked back with his lips
+pulled down, mouthing a filthy epithet at her.
+
+After a while she followed, almost slunk, with a sense of no tip left
+beneath the saucer, her pace swinging into the indefinable tempo of
+destination, but more and more indeterminate as she approached
+Madison Square.
+
+She kept close to Third Avenue, something reassuring in the sidewalk
+gabble, the air of cheap carnival, the white arc lights over open fruit
+stands, and the percussive roar of Elevated trains. Presently even Third
+Avenue would withdraw to over its shops, the sidewalks fall quiet and
+darken, pedestrians become sinister. She shivered against that lateness;
+stood for a period outside a bird store, watching a pair of Japanese
+mice chase their little eternities in a wheel cage. At Twenty-third
+Street a youth with a prison complexion, a cap pulled down and a sweater
+pulled up, sauntered out of a pool room, matching his pace with hers,
+and at once easily colloquial.
+
+"Hello, sweetness!"
+
+Her eyebrows shot up. She could smell, feel, and taste the cheap beer on
+his breath, and anger rather than fear possessed her.
+
+"Cat got your tongue, sweetness? Where you goin'? Lonesome?"
+
+After a while he fell back, flecked off as it were like a burr clutching
+for a metal surface.
+
+It was her conviction, many times put to test, that such situations lay
+within her shaping, and that man took his cue from the yea or nay of
+her attitude.
+
+At the sight of a crowd tightening about a street corner she edged her
+way in. The iron plug to a corner sewer had been removed, a policeman
+and the shirt-sleeved figure of a man prone on the ground, red-faced and
+arms inserted their length.
+
+"What is it?" asked Lilly, tiptoeing.
+
+"A feller's gold watch rolled down."
+
+"Who'll go down on a rope?" called out the owner.
+
+"I will," cried Lilly.
+
+The crowd turned its face to her.
+
+"I will, for a hundred and fifty dollars--now--here!"
+
+In the derision and boo that went up she escaped, hurrying this time and
+without uncertainty.
+
+The Union Square Family Theater showed the lighted but quiet front of a
+performance in progress.
+
+At the stage entrance the old doorman with his look of sea dog
+recognized her, admitting her with a nod. The titter of music came back
+through the wings and quick, loud thumps of a tumbling act in progress.
+The smell of grease paint, like the flop of a cold, wet hand to her
+face, smote her with a familiarity out of all proportion to her limited
+experience in the theater.
+
+She wound, unchallenged, up the short spiral staircase.
+
+Through an open doorway of an office that had been refurnished in large
+mahogany desk, filing case, and a stack of sectional bookcases, Robert
+Visigoth sat tilted on a swivel chair, his hands locked at the back of
+his head, gaze and cigar toward the ceiling.
+
+She stood in the doorway a second, watching his perceptions dawn.
+
+"Hel-lo!" he said, finally, uncrossing a knee grown slightly corpulent
+and his rather small eyes crinkling to slits. "Hel-lo!"
+
+She was arch and laughed back.
+
+"A bad penny, you see."
+
+He swung a chair toward her without rising.
+
+"Turned up, didn't you? Good."
+
+She seated herself, with that coquetry of hers which she could force on
+occasion, feeling his glance as it ran over her dawning shabbiness as
+searingly as a flame. It darted on downward to her feet, and because
+that very day the leather in her right shoe had cracked, showing a grin
+of white lining, she wound that foot up around the chair rung.
+
+"I took sick--that time," she explained, fatuously.
+
+He lifted her hand, bending back each finger to match his words.
+
+"You are a naughty girl. Why did you run away?"
+
+She sat swallowing through obvious gulps, but increasingly determined to
+be arch.
+
+"Please--don't," trying to withdraw her hand.
+
+"Come now," he said through a half smile and watching her redden almost
+to purple, "you don't hate me that badly or you wouldn't be back here."
+
+"I know I don't."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Hate you."
+
+"Good! Now we're getting on."
+
+"I need something, Mr. Visigoth--terribly."
+
+"We're not using that song specialty any more," he said, kindly.
+
+"I've given up that sort of thing, too, Mr. Visigoth. I'm a stenographer
+now."
+
+"Smartest thing you ever did."
+
+"I--I'm in a little difficulty right now--a money one. That's why I
+thought if you--Could you use me in the office? I know stenography and
+typewriting. I--It would be a godsend, Mr. Visigoth. I dislike having to
+put it so strongly--but my present difficulty is serious--very."
+
+"What's troubling you?"
+
+"I must have an office position. I want my evenings free and I cannot
+be situated so that I might have to go on the road at any time."
+
+"Married?"
+
+"Why, I--I thought--assumed that you knew I was married from the
+beginning. I--We aren't together, though; haven't been--"
+
+"Umph!"
+
+"It's just that I'm temporarily embarrassed."
+
+"That was a pretty rough way you left me in the lurch. Those actions
+don't get a girl very far in this business."
+
+"It was sickness."
+
+He leaned forward to pat her hand, his lids somehow seeming to thicken.
+
+"You're a queer little duck," he said, "but I like you. Always have."
+
+"Then you will, Mr. Visigoth?"
+
+"Well, let's not bother about that now."
+
+"But--"
+
+"There is quite a change taking place in these offices. My brother is
+coming from Chicago to take charge of the booking end and I am going out
+there after he comes on, and I'll see if he can use you. Let us talk
+about you now."
+
+"No. No. I haven't made you understand. That isn't all. I'm in immediate
+need. So immediate! I need as much as--as a hundred and fifty--two
+hundred--here, now, to-night!"
+
+"Whew!"
+
+"It is so difficult to explain, but if you would. If you could! I will
+work it out for you, beginning tomorrow morning. To the last penny. Two
+hundred dollars advance on any salary you may see fit to pay me, if you
+would! I'm not afraid to start small. Within a week I'll prove my value
+to you--that's how I'll slave for advancement. Just two hundred dollars
+advance on my salary--one hundred and fifty if--"
+
+"Well, well, well," he said, stropping up and down the back of her hand,
+"that does put a different face on things, doesn't it? I just don't know
+what to say."
+
+"Say yes. It is only my predicament gives me the courage to ask. But I
+need money, Mr. Visigoth. Need it. Need it. Now--to-night! I'll pay it
+back in service. I--"
+
+"Come now," he said, his eyes crinkling again. "You don't mean that,
+Lilly. I'm a man and you're a woman. I don't want your money."
+
+"I'll go any length for yours."
+
+"What length?"
+
+"Any--you say."
+
+He leaned forward at that and kissed down into her lips so deeply that
+her neck was strained backward to hurting. She sprang to her feet,
+wiping her hand across her mouth until her lips dragged, but trying
+to laugh.
+
+"You hurt."
+
+"That's what I want to do--hurt, hurt," kissing down into and crushing
+her lips again and again.
+
+"Oh! oh! oh!" she moaned rather than cried, pummeling at his chest.
+
+"Devil," he said, jerking her back to him until the breath jumped from
+her.
+
+"I--I hate you!"
+
+"Good!"
+
+"I'm not what you think I am. I hate you. I hate--sex. I--"
+
+"I don't care what I think you are. I only know that I want to be the
+one to wake you up to the knowledge that sex is life and life is sex.
+Ice maid. I don't care what you are. I know that I like you. I know
+that I like your lips. Give me."
+
+"Quick, then," she said, trying not to shudder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She squirmed from him finally, pushing against him with all her
+strength.
+
+"Ugh. How I--I--hate--"
+
+"Gad! how I like your lips!"
+
+"Let me go now."
+
+He looked down at her through slits of eyes.
+
+"To the last cent, you said."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Come, then," he said. "I live alone."
+
+"Please," she said, her palm pat against her mouth and looking at him
+with streaming eyes. "Please--not that--"
+
+For answer he kissed her again so brutally that she sat down, moaning
+her shame.
+
+"You're a woman of the world, Lilly. You don't want anything for
+nothing. Life wouldn't balance up that way."
+
+"But I'll--"
+
+"Yes, yes, I'm going to give you a position, too. Fifteen a week to
+start with, to show you I mean well by you. You beautiful
+sleepy-eyed thing!"
+
+"I'm not what you think--"
+
+"All right, I know. Never again after to-night, so help me God! This
+isn't my kind of thing any more than it is yours. Any position you want
+in this office to-morrow morning and me off to Chicago for permanent
+headquarters next month. I'm good pay. Are you? Now? To-night?"
+
+"My hundred and fifty--"
+
+"Two hundred!"
+
+"Yes--I'm good pay--now--to-night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+With a flaying intensity that kept her teeth unconsciously ground
+together so that when she relaxed their pressure the gums fairly sang,
+Lilly took up her work in the office of the newly incorporated Universal
+Amusement Enterprises.
+
+The clerical department occupied a large unfinished room, obviously
+makeshift, that had previously been used for the storage of stage
+properties. There were two flat-topped desks, placed so that their
+swivel chairs faced across a considerable expanse of surface, two
+bookkeepers' perches also rigged up to meet the exigencies of run-away
+affairs, and her own little table with its brand-new typewriting
+machine.
+
+Yet Lilly never entered the rather cold breath of this atmosphere
+without a sense of haven. It was as if she had turned the key on those
+areas that lay outside of the immediate present. She could take the
+dictation of a letter to the printers, or a manufacturer of slot
+machines for opera glasses, or to a ventriloquist guilty of disorderly
+conduct behind the scenes, with the whole of her concentration brought
+to bear upon her pencil point until very often it snapped under the
+nervousness of her pressure.
+
+Then Robert Visigoth, who dictated with his ten fingertips together to
+form a little chapel, would invariably wedge a pleasantry into her
+tightly maintained attitude, but there was a freshly sharpened pencil
+always at hand in the little patch of shirt-waist pocket, so that even
+this slight schism was seldom accomplished.
+
+Her work consisted of some correspondence, mimeographing of programs for
+distribution to orchestra leaders, scene shifters, printers, bookkeeping
+and publicity department. Quite a bit of communication by wire, letter,
+and telephone with the Chicago office, and upon one very recent occasion
+she had been summoned down to the auditorium together with a Mrs. Ida
+Blair, one of the bookkeepers, for the try-out performance of a sketch,
+with the request for a written opinion on its box-office value.
+
+Lilly alone had sent in a negative report--"Too sophisticated and not
+sufficient emotional appeal for vaudeville." On the strength of several
+opposing yeas, the playlet was booked, and removed after the second
+performance--a little secret feather which Lilly wore jauntily on a
+little secret cap.
+
+In these eight weeks a quiescence that was like a hand to the
+reverberating parchment of a drum had come over her. It was, in fact, as
+if the whole throbbing orchestration of her universe had stopped as it
+sometimes can seem to upon the motion-picture screen, leaving the action
+to click on quietly without the excitation of music.
+
+She had taken, at the instance of Mrs. Blair, a room in an Eleventh
+Street house. The odor of Bohemia, which is the odor of poverty through
+cigarette smoke, lay on the hallways. There were frequent all-night
+revelries reverberated down from the skylight room on the top floor, and
+one evening a passing group had beat a can-can of invitation on her
+doorway; but she could lock and bolt herself into her room, a box, it is
+true, at two dollars and a half a week, but it boasted half curtains of
+yellow scrim, a couch-bed with a moth-eaten but gay wool cover, and a
+small square of table with a reading lamp attached by a tube to the
+gas jet.
+
+She found herself during the routine of her business day looking forward
+to these long, quiet evenings beside the tiny table. There had been
+eight unbroken weeks of them, and each Sunday a fresh little mound of
+sheer garments to be carried out to Spuyten Duyvil. Her old inaptitude
+with the needle, by no means overcome, hampered her so that her stitches
+were often wandering gypsy trails to be ripped over and over, and then
+her fingers leaving little prick stains to be washed out.
+
+She had grown thinner, so much so that a slight jaw line had come out,
+but the shells were gone from beneath her eyes and it pleased her, when
+she brushed out her hair before going to bed, to see that its
+electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so
+that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little
+spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her
+lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows
+when she arched them.
+
+She liked to stand before her wavy mirror, folding the completed
+garments and looking back at herself. Newly freed, probably by the great
+Auchinloss and her daughter between them, from the bondage of an idea,
+she felt corporeally lighter, and was. The toothache of her being had
+ceased its neuralgic stabbings.
+
+It was not unusual for her to stand before this mirror before climbing
+into bed, her mouth bunched to mimetics.
+
+"Zoe, come to mother. _Mother!_ Daughter, they're shouting for you! Let
+me hold your flowers, darling; they'll smother you!... You mean the one
+with the yellow curls, madam? The valedictorian? That's my daughter!"
+
+All the spots would come out in her eyes, like little "niggers" in a
+pair of diamonds, and more often than not she would fall asleep then
+with a crescent moon of a smile lying deeply into her face.
+
+One day, after these weeks of minute fidelity to routine, she was
+startled somewhat by a request from Robert Visigoth, in the form of a
+note sent over to her desk, to remain after six to take some dictation.
+The big temporary-looking office with its absence of partitions and
+staring lack of privacy had become a paradoxical source of security to
+her. In all the eight weeks, three of which, it is true, he had spent in
+Chicago, she had not once encountered Robert Visigoth alone. She had
+subconsciously developed the habit of peering down the dark stairs that
+led to the stage door before descending them, and on one or two
+occasions, when they chanced to pass, had flattened herself rather
+unduly against the wall. Her comings and goings, whether by maneuver or
+not, were seldom alone. She and this Mrs. Blair, a sparse, umbrella of a
+woman with a very bitter kind of widowhood, had formed the noonday habit
+of taking a dairy lunch of milk and cereal at a near-by White Kitchen
+and of departing evenings for there, too, since it spelled strong, hot,
+simple foods and a very superior kind of cleanliness.
+
+It was with a distinct sinkage, well laid over with office
+imperturbability, that she showed Mrs. Blair the note, saw her stab into
+her greenish-black bird's nest of a hat and depart alone. Then the
+office boy; the publicity man, whistling; a clerk or two, and finally a
+sixteen-year-old girl who pasted clippings into scrap books.
+
+The pleasantly cool summer day had thickened up rather suddenly into the
+beginnings of dusk, the electric sign down over the theater throwing up
+a sudden glow through the windows. She sat before her machine, shorthand
+book in lap, her attitude quiet enough except that her hands, as they
+clasped each other, showed whitish at the nails, and she would not
+swerve her gaze by the fraction of an inch, even with the consciousness
+of a presence behind her.
+
+It was Visigoth at her shoulder, the male aroma of him, a mixture of
+cigar smoke, bay rum, and freshly washed hands, and the feel of his
+rough-serge suit very close.
+
+She rose, withholding herself stiffly from his nearness, marveling, as
+always, at this power of hers to endure him so casually.
+
+"Letters?" she asked.
+
+He placed a knee on the chair rung, tilting it toward him, and leaning
+across the back at her.
+
+"You funny, funny girl," he said, regarding her intently through the
+crinkling eyes.
+
+She met his stare in a challenging sort of silence.
+
+"My, what big eyes you have!"
+
+"Please," she said, retreating from the look in his, her weight against
+the table until it slid.
+
+"Please what?" he rather mimicked, advancing the exact distance of her
+withdrawal, the smile out on his never quite dry lips.
+
+"Please--don't."
+
+The corpulency which was one day to envelop him like suet was already
+giving him the appearance of ten years his senior. He had upon occasion
+been mistaken for the father of his younger brother, and some of
+Lilly's acute distaste for him, across the slight enough chasm of the
+seven or eight years between them, was already that of youth for
+lascivious age.
+
+"Shall I take those letters now--Mr. Visigoth?"
+
+"I would rather take you--to dinner."
+
+"I might have known," she said, rather tiredly.
+
+"What?"
+
+"That you would not keep your word."
+
+"I have though, for eight weeks."
+
+"I thought your promise meant--"
+
+"Ah no. I never broke a promise in my life, but even I cannot be
+expected to keep one indefinitely with a girl like you within eyeshot."
+
+"That can be easily corrected."
+
+"Come now, I'm giving you your chance here to make good."
+
+"Well then, let me take it."
+
+"My dear girl, never expect the best of us to be more than human."
+
+"I suppose, then, this is to be the regulation,
+theatrical-manager-dangers-of-a-big-city kind of scene."
+
+"Come now," he said, his voice plushy with the right to intimacy. "We
+understand each other--Lilly."
+
+She stood silent, flaming her humiliation.
+
+"And I like you for it. If there is one thing to my mind less
+interesting than another, it is the untempted kind of woman who--"
+
+"I never pretended to you, Mr. Visigoth, that I was what you are pleased
+to term--tempted!"
+
+"No? But how much more redeeming if you had been."
+
+"Nothing can ever redeem that--night--except--"
+
+"Except?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know--maybe--except--God."
+
+"You funny, funny girl!" he repeated. "I like you."
+
+"I know your kind of liking. You like me for the kind of thing you would
+protect your wife or your daughter from with all the fury of your little
+elemental soul."
+
+"I haven't a wife, I haven't a daughter, and I like you."
+
+"No, but you will have presently. Your kind always does and you'll be
+the ideal family man who telephones home from the office three times a
+day to see if the baby has taken her cough medicine regularly, and
+you'll knock the man down that brushes your wife too closely in a crowd,
+and because of your attitude toward all but your own women you'll
+suspect every man who even approaches your daughter. In the eyes of the
+world you're entitled to your wild oats. That's what I am, a wild oat to
+be sown at your pleasure. If you haven't any letters, Mr. Visigoth, I'm
+going. I--"
+
+"No," he said, closing his hand over hers. "Don't."
+
+"You force me."
+
+"Nonsense! Haven't I promised to let you be, Lilly? I've respected that
+promise to the letter, as I always respect a promise. The past is dead,
+it died with that night. I swear it over again."
+
+"Dead, with your reminding me with every word you utter--every look."
+
+"Nonsense, I tell you! I've treated you like everyone else in this
+office. Made things easy for you. Helped you."
+
+"And I've tried to justify my position in your office. To hold it by
+sheer merit so that this--this wouldn't--couldn't happen. And now
+you--your daring to keep me here like this shows me I've failed."
+
+"You haven't. You've raised the efficiency of the office forty per cent.
+I'm turning you over to my brother as a prize. I've got you in mind for
+the booking end of the business. That's what I think of you."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Visigoth, if you knew--if you knew what that would mean to me.
+I'll give you my best! Let me go on proving to you that I want to stay
+here to make good on my merits--as man to man!"
+
+"I wish to God I could figure you out."
+
+"I made it clear--that night--"
+
+"But I flattered myself at least that--"
+
+"You hadn't that right. Ours was a cold business deal. So much for so
+much! I never for a moment pretended otherwise. I was in need. Terrible
+need. I didn't think when I came to you that you would do business on
+any other terms than you did."
+
+"I envy the fellow that awakens you."
+
+"Oh, I've been awakened! Awakened to the fact that a woman out in the
+world has to fight through a barrier of yourselves that you men erect.
+But I'm not afraid of your barrier. In the last analysis I know, that I
+have the situation in hand. Every woman has. It is a matter of whether
+she will or she won't! I had an alternative--that night. Could have
+taken it, but wouldn't. Would do the same over again. A man invariably
+takes his cue. You took yours. Even a street masher takes his cue from
+the look in her eyes whether he will or won't follow up."
+
+"Right, but public sentiment is all on the woman's side."
+
+"It's worth more to me to know that the situation was in my own hands
+than it is to play the sensational role of more sinned against
+than usual."
+
+"You're immense."
+
+Dryly, "Doubtless, from your point of view."
+
+"From any--"
+
+"Now look here. I need this position here more desperately than I ever
+needed anything in my life. It means the success or failure of something
+that I've staked every card on, of a fight that nobody in the world
+would understand--possibly not even myself. But that doesn't change the
+fact that the situation again is mine. I am in a position now to demand
+fairer terms than I was--then. I return to work to-morrow only on those
+terms, Mr. Visigoth."
+
+The veil of light from the sign fell upon her in the rigidity of her
+pose and pallor. For some reason she was hugging one of the book-shaped
+letter files, all the black out in her eyes.
+
+He sat down, straddling the chair, his arms across the back and his chin
+down upon them.
+
+"Who are you?" he said, regarding her with the intense squint of one in
+need of glasses.
+
+She felt her power over the moment, and with her old slant for it began
+to dramatize.
+
+"I'm the grist being ground between yesterday and to-day. Sometimes I
+think I must be some sort of an unfinished symphony which it will take
+another generation to complete. I am a river and I long to be a sea. I
+must be the grape between the vine of my family and the wine of my
+progeny. That's it, I'm the grape fermenting!"
+
+Then she felt absurd and looked absurd and stood there with the quick
+fizzing spurt of exultation died down into a state of bathos.
+
+"Let me stay on here on my terms, Mr. Visigoth," she finished with a
+sort of broken-wing lameness of voice.
+
+"What terms?"
+
+"The terms you have been generous enough not to violate up to now. I've
+the most glorious reason for wanting to make good that a girl--a woman
+could have. I don't think the career stuff, as you once called it, is
+rankling any more. I'm suddenly glad and quiet about my job. Let me stay
+on. Let me make myself indispensable to this growing, interesting
+enterprise of yours. Why, even watching the letters grow in numbers and
+importance, and using the little individuality in handling them that you
+are beginning to allow me, is a game worth playing! I'm like a bad girl
+who has been spanked by life and is all chastened and ready to be good.
+If you are the clever business man I think you are, you'll let me stay,
+Mr. Visigoth, on my terms."
+
+There was a shine to her there in the half light, probably because her
+eyes were wide and the muscles of her face lifted so that her teeth
+showed, but not in a smile.
+
+"I played the game on your terms, Mr. Visigoth; now meet me on mine."
+
+"Put your cards on the table, then; no fine flights of speech either.
+Who are you?"
+
+"I told you from the first I am a married woman, with nothing to be said
+against my husband except that he was part of a condition that was
+intolerable to me."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"West."
+
+"Stage ambition, eh?"
+
+"Yes or--I don't know. Too many ambitions of all kinds crawling over me
+like a terrible itch, for God knows what. Fermenting. The grape
+fermenting! But I'm quiet now. So quiet that sometimes I think I
+wouldn't change it for even the--the singing wine of fulfillment. I
+don't think I can make you understand. I seem to have been stretching
+all these years for--for something my arm isn't quite long enough to
+touch, and now my child--my little girl--"
+
+"You have a child?"
+
+"A little girl."
+
+"How old?"
+
+"Eleven weeks."
+
+He looked at her across a long silence.
+
+"Good God!" he said, and then again, "Good God."
+
+"Yes," she said, watching belated comprehensions flood up into his face,
+"that was it."
+
+"You mean you had on your hands that night a--"
+
+"Yes, a three-and-a-half-weeks-old one."
+
+"You were broke?"
+
+"Stony."
+
+"Good God! You--poor--"
+
+"I'm not pleading for your sympathy, Mr. Visigoth. Only a square deal.
+Will you give it?"
+
+He walked over to his desk, turning on a green-shaded bulb, the clip
+back in his voice and manner.
+
+"That will be all for this evening, Mrs. Parlow--"
+
+"Penny."
+
+"Mrs. Penny," he said, picking up a random sheaf of papers and not
+meeting her eyes. "I want you to go over to Newark Monday afternoon and
+bring back a report on an act over there; and, by the way, you are to
+begin your new week in the booking department at twenty dollars."
+
+She wanted to speak and her lips did move, but the tears anticipated
+her, and, blink as she would, they sprang, magnifying her glance, and
+besides, there were footsteps coming up the flight of stairs that led
+from the stage entrance, and a young, a lean, a honed silhouette rather
+suddenly in the doorway, the right side borne down by the pull of a
+dress-suit case.
+
+"R.J?" Peering into the gloom.
+
+"Good Lord!" from the figure at the desk, leaning forward on the palm of
+his hand. "That you, Bruce?"
+
+They met center, gripping hands.
+
+"When did you get in, youngster? Didn't expect you for another couple of
+days."
+
+"Just now. Took a chance on finding you here."
+
+"Another five minutes and you wouldn't have."
+
+"So these are the new diggings?"
+
+"There is your desk."
+
+He deposited his hat on the flat top indicated, his silhouette cutting
+vigorously into the dimness, particularly the rather heavy double wave
+to his hair causing Lilly to grope with a vague sense of having seen him
+before. It was merely a rather remote resemblance to the remote Horace
+Lindsley, but not for days did she stumble across this realization.
+
+She knew, instinctively, even while she marveled at his youth and the
+merest and most lightninglike resemblance to his brother, that here was
+Bruce Visigoth, and what she did not know was that a certain throaty
+resonance to his voice had a tendency to gooseflesh her and that quite
+suddenly her eyes were very hot and her hands very cold.
+
+"Well, R.J.," he was saying, and she noticed that his head came up with
+a fine kind of young defiance, as if a pair of invisible Mercury wings
+flowed with the sleek nap of his hair, "I'm for taking a chance on the
+Buffalo lease. I stopped over yesterday and the little theater looks
+good to me."
+
+It was then Lilly began noiselessly to move toward the door.
+
+"Oh--here--Mrs. Penny. My brother, Mrs. Penny. Sort of secretary on the
+booking department, and a darn good one."
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. Penny? Mighty pleased," he said, through the
+resonance that had a little aftermath of a ting to it.
+
+Her five fingers rather trailed along the palm of his hand as he slowly
+released her.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Visigoth," she said, smiling up at him with her
+eyebrows, pressing down her sailor hat, and hurrying toward the
+staircase.
+
+Outside, the darkness had the quality of cool water to her face. The
+palm of her right hand and the tips of her fingers were tingling as if
+they had been kissed.
+
+She could have run before the wind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+From now on for many a month to come, the curve of Lilly's life would
+have shown a running festoon; six days whose uneventful continuity was
+bearable because they were looped up by the rosette of the Sundays at
+Spuyten Duyvil.
+
+When Zoe was two years old this hebdomadal consciousness was already
+borne upon her. Into her earliest vocabulary, as haphazard as if the
+words had been dished up out of the alphabet of a vermicelli soup, crept
+the word "Sunday," mysteriously boiled down to "Nunk," the first time
+her mother heard it, the pride seeming to crowd around her heart, fairly
+suffocating her.
+
+As if the luster of this girl child could be any brighter, yet here was
+the new shine of the mental beginning to radiate through. Nunk!
+
+Was there any limit to this ecstasy of possession? It ran through her
+days like a song.
+
+It meant that while the home-going six-o'clock rush at Union Square,
+which of face is the composite immobility of a dead Chinaman, would
+presently cram into street cars and then deploy out into the
+inhospitable cubbyholes of the most hospitable city in the world, Lilly,
+even in her weariness, could be deterred by the lure of a curb vender
+and a jumping toy dog. There was never a time or a weather that she
+could pass, without pause, Westheim's Art Needlework Shop on Broadway
+and its array of linen-lawn dainties, and, remarkably enough, the
+purchase of the toy dog or a five-cent peppermint cane could send her
+home with an actual physical refreshment as if she had slept off, rather
+than cast off, fatigue.
+
+She would line up during the week, Monday's toy dog, Tuesday's
+peppermint cane, Wednesday's cap rosettes (fashioned out of five yards
+of baby ribbon at one cent the yard), and so on to Saturday's climax of
+bootines, and on one occasion a large circular wooden arrangement, a
+sort of first aid to the first step, which she carried out herself,
+standing with it on the train platform.
+
+With her three months' running start, paid in advance and duly receipted
+by Mrs. Dupree, Lilly's weekly expenditures, by the nicest calculation,
+reduced themselves thus:
+
+Room rent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$2.50
+Car fare (one round trip to Spuyten Duyvil). . . . . . . . .  .60
+Breakfast (gas-jet boiled egg, an apple, three biscuits from
+    a tin, and coffee) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  .50
+Lunch (milk, cereal, sandwich) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.50
+Dinner (lamb or beef stew, green vegetable, pie, coffee.
+    Tip) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.50
+Laundry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  .75
+                                                            -----
+                                                            $9.35
+
+There were already forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents hoarded in a
+little biscuit tin in the depths of her valise, and out of it had come a
+gift for Mrs. Dupree, a rather interesting relic of an old silver
+thimble wrought in cunning filigree which she had bought in two payments
+of seventy-five cents each, and largely by eliminating the pie for a
+month, from a rapidly diminishing keep-chest of Ida Blair's.
+
+A friendship had sprung up here, which, born out of the merest
+propinquity, had sent down strong roots into the common ground
+between them.
+
+One or two nights they had attended the theater together, on orchestra
+passes given out to them by one or the other of the Visigoths.
+
+One Wednesday evening they saw the "School for Scandal" presented at the
+Academy of Music, and once, just before the permanent departure of R.J.
+for Chicago, he had tossed negligently across the desk a single balcony
+ticket for Eames in "Faust."
+
+"Here is something ought to keep one of you busy this rainy evening."
+
+Ensued a highly feminine parley.
+
+"Mrs. Blair, you take the ticket. Really, I'm too tired and I've some
+sewing to do."
+
+"Nonsense! You're musical and I'm not. Besides, it will do you a world
+of good."
+
+"I don't know," said Lilly, her lips giving a sensitive quiver. "I've
+put it so out of my mind that it might only tantalize."
+
+But in the end she did attend, seating herself, for the first time in
+her life, in the F-minor, the perfumed twilight of the Metropolitan
+Opera House, just as the velvet curtains swished sibilantly apart.
+
+Day was breaking, and in all the passion and churchiness of Gounod, the
+student calls for death, the echoes of human happiness rustling through
+the background like the scything sound of harvesting.
+
+Lilly could scarcely breathe for the poignancy of sensation. She was all
+throat. Faust's opening greeting to the dawn, his challenge to
+happiness, pierced her. She sat forward on her chair, anticipating the
+lyrical vision of Marguerite, her hands clasped over the handle of her
+wet umbrella, and her knees crowded up unconsciously about its dampness.
+
+She bought the libretto, humming down into it between acts and leaping
+ahead to verify her memory of the score.
+
+Poor Lilly, it is doubtful if she was by endowment more than a lovely
+melomaniac doomed never to emerge from her musical primaries. A mere
+tonal accord could assail her nostrils like a perfume set to music. And
+yet her quick ear, though, was not exact. Her capacity for fine vocal
+distinctions in her own singing had been distinctly limited, and a note
+landing just this side of itself could drop down into her state of
+ecstatic coma with hardly a plop. She had neither capacity for
+exactitude nor tireless fidelity to tone. It made her neck ache. She had
+never graduated from musical sensation to cerebration; a theme washed
+her over with all the voluptuous abandon of a Henner sea siren letting
+the water tickling up the beach to roll over her lightly.
+
+There was unrest in the balcony because Faust was singing through
+laryngitis and a cloud of fog in his throat. A critic who wrote in terms
+of elliptical rhythms and tonal arabesques tiptoed out for a smoke. One
+of those sympathetic fits of coughing swept the house. But Lilly sat
+hunched in her habitual beatific attitude against the chair back, the
+old opera flowing back to her in association that caught her at
+the tonsils.
+
+"Lilly, play that over, the left hand alone."
+
+"Oh, mamma, mamma!"
+
+That blue challis wrapper shotted with pink rosebuds.
+
+"Lilly, play that over."
+
+Eames down there flinging up the "Jewel Song" like a curve of gold. Her
+place!
+
+She half rose to her feet.
+
+Down in front!
+
+She sat again, but a sudden, an inexplicable sense of wanting to plunge
+from the height of the balcony seized her. It had been so long since the
+old neuralgic stabbings of spirit. She wanted to jump and had a
+ludicrous vision of herself landing down in the cream of white shoulders
+and crashing through the U of one of those immaculate shirt fronts. She
+could have torn and scratched the indestructibility of her failure and
+wanted suddenly and terribly to wrap those pearl-twined taffy braids
+around the rising throat of Marguerite as she sprayed the auditorium
+with the "Jewel Song," a great fire hose of liquid music finding out
+every cranny.
+
+In the deep-napped velvet of this melodious darkness Lilly rose
+suddenly, pushing her way out through knee-impeded aisles and a string
+of protestations.
+
+An usher helped her to find a door. She ran down several flights and
+into a side street. A slant of rain met her and she charged into it with
+bent head and umbrella. Bubbles with a tap of sleet in them exploded
+like little torpedoes on the sidewalks, curbs were rushing water, and
+Broadway was as black and oily-looking as a foundry. She tried to
+visualize it as she had seen it that first morning from her window at
+the Hudson Hotel, pink with sun.
+
+The picture would not conjure, and finally, because her shoes were full
+of bubbles and her damp skirt clung and hindered walking, she boarded a
+street car and sat looking out of the water-lashed windows, her throat
+full of little moans like the song of a kettle just about to boil.
+
+When she reached home there was an envelope beneath her door. It
+contained a snapshot picture of herself and Zoe taken by Mrs. Dupree
+one Sunday afternoon. Still wet, she sat down with it on the bed edge.
+Against a background of shrub and stone steps Lilly was little more than
+a blur, but Zoe, with five little fingers dug into her cheek, leaped
+from the picture, all her dimples out.
+
+The mood induced by the opera fell off like a cloak, a warm, easy tear
+splashing right down on the adorable little face. She wiped it off ever
+so painstakingly, holding the little print up to the gas to dry.
+
+Then she stood it up on the table so she could gaze down and smile while
+she undressed, and even placed it on the floor as she leaned down to
+unlace her shoes. She climbed into bed with it under her pillow, but
+rose in the darkness to transfer it, against crumpling, beneath
+the mattress.
+
+She went to sleep right off with a little smile on her lips, as if the
+picture had kissed it there, but it was many a day, sixteen years, in
+fact, before she could be induced to enter the Metropolitan Opera House
+again, and then only in the most crowded hour of her life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Quite a friendship was thriving between Lilly and Mrs. Blair. The older
+woman had opened the door to her upon that family skeleton, one of
+which, by the way, lurks in the cupboards of most of us--the unproduced
+play! This one, a sketch called "The Web," read by Lilly and even placed
+by her with a written word of appreciation on Robert Visigoth's desk.
+
+He carried it with him to Chicago, mailing it back one day without
+comment.
+
+"Just the same, there is a corking idea there. You ought to develop it
+into a long play, Mrs. Blair."
+
+"I will some day," she replied, with a cryptic something in her voice
+that Lilly was only to understand a year later.
+
+One spring evening, that year later, as she and Mrs. Blair sat in her
+small room beside the open window that looked out over the twilighted
+rear of housetops, Lilly was induced to sing, quietly, almost under her
+breath, sitting there on the floor with her hands clasped about her
+knees, her invariable shirt waist and dark-blue skirt discarded for a
+pleasant sense of negligee in a pink cotton-crepe kimono, her hair
+flowing with the swift sort of rush peculiar to it.
+
+They had just completed, as a relief from the nightly round of lunch
+rooms, a wood-alcohol meal of canned baked beans, cheese, crackers, and
+tinned sweet cakes. Even Mrs. Blair, at an age when the years are at
+the throat of a woman, shriveling it, had opened her blouse at the neck,
+revealing an unsuspected survival of its whiteness.
+
+Lilly sang "Jocelyn," a lullaby dimmed in her memory by the mist of
+years and full of inaccuracies. She had last sung it at Flora Kemble's.
+
+It lay on the twilight after she had finished.
+
+"How pretty! Why don't you let one of the Visigoths hear you? It might
+lead to something."
+
+"Robert V. has heard me."
+
+"Well, I don't pretend to be a judge of music, but considering your
+youth and looks and when I see the kind of thing that does get across--"
+
+"I know. I used to feel that way about it, too--hot, rebellious--but,
+somehow, not any more. Strange that it should have taken my child to
+show me. I realized it last winter when I heard Eames. I simply hadn't
+it to give, except in desire. Why, her voice--it seemed to climb up
+around an invisible spiral staircase to the stars; and that wasn't all!
+There was something so richly colored through it--like the candy stripe
+through a crystal. I know now--and I'm glad I know--that my ambition was
+bigger than my talent."
+
+"I suppose that is what you thought about me, too, when you read my
+sketch."
+
+"No, no. I admit I did think it amateurish, but there is an idea in 'The
+Web.' Almost as if you had lived it yourself and had written it in
+blood. Besides, you know the secret of concentration; it shows in your
+work at the office. I couldn't stick night after night over one of those
+trial balances of yours. I'd throw it over. I've never in my life really
+worked for anything. Even as a child I used to cheat myself--move the
+clock; hadn't that sublime capacity for grind. That was part of the
+lack. How clear it all seems now!"
+
+"The cruelest clarity in the world is wisdom after the event."
+
+"Oh, but I wouldn't have one thing different! It simply wasn't in me to
+want badly enough, and therefore I didn't attain. But I know--I know,
+Mrs. Blair, that there is a logic running somewhere through it all.
+Nothing has been in vain. I'm out on a highroad now with open running
+ahead. I'm going to rear her into a superwoman. She is my song, Zoe!
+There is logic, I tell you, Mrs. Blair--straight through the apparent
+mix-up. Off somewhere in Corsica a vine is putting down roots that there
+may be wine in somebody's glass some day. The vine. The grape.
+The wine."
+
+"The vine. The grape. The wine."
+
+"Don't you understand now a little better, Mrs. Blair, why this poor
+little fermenting grape couldn't stay on the vine?"
+
+"You've told me so little, dear."
+
+"More than I've ever told a living soul. There's one thought I love to
+carry about with me about Zoe. She was born out of captivity. No Chinese
+shoes for her little mind or her little soul or body. I'm vague about it
+now, just as I'm half crystallized about everything. But this time my
+will to do is unlimited and unfaltering! Her whole life is going to be a
+growth toward fulfillment of self. I want life to dawn upon her in great
+truths, not in ugly shocks and realizations. She is a plant and I am her
+trellis toward the light. Do you see? Do you? I may be as wrong as you
+think I am, Mrs. Blair--terribly, irrevocably wrong--but I wouldn't take
+her back there into that--that--sedentary fatness--I wouldn't--"
+
+A musing sort of silence had fallen into a gloom that was thickening
+into darkness.
+
+"The more I see of your case, Lilly, the less I understand it. To think
+of anyone in this world of suffering deliberately bringing it upon
+herself. Why, my dear, it isn't any of my business, but when I think of
+those parents of yours out there, comprehending nothing, and that poor
+bewildered husband of yours, I could cry for them."
+
+"Do you think I don't, Mrs. Blair, whole nightfuls of tears? Why,
+yesterday at the Library in my home paper I saw a little local notice of
+my mother's euchre club meeting at our house--it was a knife,
+somehow--the pain of it--"
+
+"I'm not saying so much about the husband, only, God knows why a woman
+should throw away a life-time of protection just because a man chews
+with his temples and--"
+
+"Surely you haven't taken that literally! I only tried to symbolize for
+you that the unimportant mannerisms that may even delight in one person
+can become monstrosities in another. Oh, I haven't made you
+understand--"
+
+"Yes, dear child, you have made me understand this much. What a fine
+sense of satire the power behind the throne of the world must have. Take
+me--that first little two-by-four home of mine over in a back street of
+Newark. Talk to me of freedom! I married to get away from it. Somebody
+who cared whether I came or went. Somebody who cared enough to want to
+restrict me."
+
+"Ah yes, but--"
+
+"We had a little house on Dayton Street; must have been a hundred years
+old, with funny little leaded panes and a staircase rising out of the
+parlor to a queer old box of a bedroom with slant walls. We painted the
+floors ourselves and Lon did the doors in burntwood. He had a feeling
+for the artistic, Lon had. That was the way we met--that was--the
+way--we--met."
+
+"How?"
+
+"He was a police sergeant then, and I was bookkeeping for the time for
+Metz Producing Company. Lon used to drop in once in a while for passes.
+Then he got to waiting for me evenings with little pencil drawings of
+all the funny things that had happened to him during the day. I was
+strong for him to get off the force and take up art, but even then, now
+that I look back on it, I can see that Lon was fed up on propositions
+that it was driving him half mad to resist. That in itself should have
+put me on my guard, but it didn't. I don't know why I'm telling you
+all this--"
+
+"Go on."
+
+"Oh, I must have known in a way that Lon was drinking in his effort to
+keep his eyes shut to the bribe money that could have come his way. He
+never came home to me under the influence, but toward--the end--his eyes
+began to glassen up. I was all for getting his beat changed. You see, it
+took him down into the gang and red-light districts. More than that, I
+had my heart set on seeing him off the force altogether. I wanted to
+keep my position for a year or two after we were married and send him to
+Paris to study art. I've some cartoons in my trunk. That boy would have
+made good as--Well, it didn't happen. I blame myself. Marriage made a
+great baby of me, Lilly. You see, I'd never been coddled in my life--all
+those years of struggle on my own. Well I just turned soft and he loved
+to baby me. Why, when I went back to bookkeeping I had to learn it all
+over like a beginner--that's how wrapped up I became in that little
+home of ours!"
+
+"How long, Mrs. Blair, did you live in it?"
+
+"Fourteen months and five days. It was a tiny place and we didn't have
+much to spend at first, but what I had I managed to good advantage. Lon
+hated makeshift. He couldn't get the fun out of simplicity that I could.
+He wanted to dress me up. He wanted a big house. Big. Everything big.
+That was his undoing. That's what they called him in the Ring, I learned
+later, 'Gentleman Lon.' And I never knew there was a Ring! Never knew
+the filthy inside workings of the graft game existed. That's the way he
+protected me from everything ugly--from poverty. Me, that had never been
+protected from either. O God! if he'd only been truthful with me those
+last few months. I--I can't talk about it--I--"
+
+"Then don't, dear Mrs. Blair, I didn't mean to--"
+
+"He began bringing home more money than was natural, but he always
+explained it--a tip from a bucket shop on his beat--extra duty. If I had
+been right strong those days I might have suspected. Once he walked the
+floor all night, said it was a toothache, my poor boy! and let me fix a
+hot-water bottle for him. Then two men came one evening and there was
+some loud talk down in the parlor and I heard words like 'squeal' and
+'gangsters.' He told me when he came upstairs that one of them was
+Eckstein. But how was I to know who Eckstein was? Didn't, until I heard
+it was he who had been--shot. I--You see, the captain had closed in on
+Eckstein's place because of a personal grudge, and Eckstein came
+running to Lon to save him. Threatened to squeal on Lon--on the whole
+business--if he didn't. Lon was hot-headed--got frightened--lost his
+head. O God! I don't know what--never will know--"
+
+"Know--what?"
+
+"That evening he stayed home and helped me fix up the nursery. Yes, I
+was expecting in the spring. That's why he was so for keeping things
+from me. We painted the woodwork white and gave a couple of coats to a
+little brown crib I had picked up second hand. He was for buying an
+enameled one on casters--he loved the best. Next night--next
+night--he--didn't come home--and at eight o'clock the following morning
+the extras were on the street--about the killing. Even then I didn't tie
+up--Lon and Eckstein. O God! God! how could I--"
+
+"Tie up what? Who?"
+
+"He was a cat's-paw, Lilly. Never believe otherwise. My boy was caught
+and trapped in the filthy cesspool of politics. There are men in this
+city--men whom I named at the trial, all the good it did me, living and
+prospering for doing worse than my boy died for. You wouldn't know of my
+boy, Lilly; you were too young then. The whole country knew him, eleven
+years ago. Lon Elaine. It's easier Blair; no questions asked. It was the
+beginning of a cleanup that my boy blazed the way for. He went to the
+gallows, Lilly--my boy--"
+
+"No! No!"
+
+"He died a gunman. Thank God his child was born dead. But he lies in my
+heart, Lilly like a saint washed clean. He sinned for love, and because
+stronger forces than he wanted him for a tool. May every man on his jury
+live to carry that truth to his grave. He killed in self-defense and he
+sinned for love. I'll exonerate him in a play, yet! I will! I'll tell
+them! I'll tell them!"
+
+Told without hysteria, her tale had almost a droning quality on the
+twilight. She was grim in her tragedy, and her lips were as twisted and
+dried as paint tubes, yet Lilly crept closer, laying her cheek rather
+timidly against the corduroyed one.
+
+"Ida Blair," she said. "I see now. 'The Web'! Oh--Ida Blair."
+
+They fell silent, the two of them, dry-eyed, cheek to cheek, drowning
+back into a long twilight that finally blackened.
+
+"I don't know why I've told you all this. It's been ten years since I've
+talked it. But your telling me that you threw it all over--that little
+home out there, and a man that was driving down deeply the stakes of his
+home--threw it over because the black spot from his collar button made
+you feel hysterical--Oh, I tell you there is a grin through the scheme
+of things. A laugh. What old man Metz used to call a belly laugh."
+
+Chin cupped in hand, Lilly stared out into a back yard that was filled
+with the tulle of winding mist, the lighted rear windows of the houses
+opposite blurry, as if seen through tears.
+
+"Just the same," she said, her lips in the straight line peculiar to
+this not infrequent reiteration, "I'd do the same if I had it to do
+over again."
+
+"How do you know that some day your child is not going to turn upon you
+with the bitterest reproaches?"
+
+"She won't; she's too much like me. That is why it is going to be
+something sublime to have the rearing of her. It is going to be like
+living my life over again the way I once dreamed it. I know even now
+what she wants, before she puckers up her little lips for it. Of course,
+you are right--he--they have the right to know. But take the shine off
+that creature? Clip the wings of her spirit? Fatten her little soul back
+there in that sluggish environment? She'd hate it as I hated! Oh you
+must have seen for yourself that Sunday I took you out there. The little
+live stars in her eyes. The plunge and rear to her little body. Never!
+She's mine! We two! Out on the open road!"
+
+"I shouldn't want the responsibility of rearing my child in a paid
+institution if I had better to offer."
+
+"I haven't better! I've proved to myself, Mrs. Blair, to what limit I
+would go to--to save her from back there. Proved it--horribly! No--no,
+she's mine. No, not even mine. She belongs to herself. As soon as her
+little brain is ready to take it in, she shall decide; but until
+then--she's mine."
+
+"Lilly--Lilly--a father ignorant of his child!"
+
+"They'd suck us back, I tell you! Self-preservation even against family
+is a first law of life! Owls eat their young! So can human beings feed
+on the thing they love. It's not these first years would matter. But
+ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. They would hitch her vision, not to
+a star, but to a--a tin dipper. You don't understand. You know it seems
+to me, Mrs. Blair, that most people, women, anyhow, are like great big
+houses with only half the rooms in use. The mentality closed up and
+musty from disuse because they have never found or made the keys. I want
+my child to live roundly--in all her mental rooms. What is the use
+closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I
+want her to know the world she lives in from attic to cellar. The good
+from the bad, so that, knowing the bad, she can love more the good. The
+right to live!"
+
+"You're for woman's rights. You're one of those suffragists."
+
+"I guess I am if woman's rights mean more breadth, more beauty, more
+realization of our latent selves. Oh, I don't know what I mean. That's
+been my curse."
+
+In the darkness Mrs. Blair put up a hand to the sheen of Lilly's flowing
+hair.
+
+"You poor child! You funny girl. You need--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"The right man to sweep you off your feet."
+
+"I knew you were going to say that. No, you're wrong. I'm not
+essentially a man's woman, Mrs. Blair. Sex isn't even as big a part of
+my life as it is of most women's. I can't flirt. I haven't an ounce of
+coquetry in me. I think I almost hate--"
+
+"You mean you hate what your experience has been. The right man for you,
+dear, a man with enough of the materialist to hold you in check and
+enough of youth and vision and ideals to soar with you. No, no, you
+don't hate him, Lilly."
+
+"Why--why--who?"
+
+"Oh, I've seen it flash between the two of you. I've watched it being
+silently born. Lilly child, look at me!"
+
+"Why, Mrs. Blair! Why--Mrs. Blair! I've never seen him outside of office
+hours in my life. I never laid eyes on him until he walked in that night
+from Chicago. Why, I--I'm a married woman! He's younger--than I--a year!
+He knows there is Zoe. He sent her up a little hobbyhorse from the
+property room. Why, Mrs. Blair--of course if you look at me
+like--that--"
+
+She was suddenly in the older woman's arms, a passionate, a peony red
+flooding her face and waving down her words. She was all for further
+resistance, but her denial had taken on an archness for which she
+somehow blushed.
+
+Besides, it was suddenly delicious to huddle there, tingling in the
+darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+There were a quality of voice, of eye, and a fine, upstanding rush of
+sooty black hair which he tried to japan down with a pair of swift
+military brushes, in the way of woman's safest judgment of
+Bruce Visigoth.
+
+By the quieter kinetics of his own sex, he was a man's man. He
+commingled easily in his clubs, a university, a Mask and Wig, a Long
+Island Canoe, and the Gramercy. Preceding his brother in this last and
+later proposing him.
+
+The resemblance between the two was neither of form nor of feature.
+Rather, it was fleeting as a wing; in fact, was just that. There was
+something in the batting of the eye, a slant of lid, that showed the
+mysterious corpuscles of the same blood asserting themselves. Yet it was
+more the likeness of father and son; the older man shorter, wider of
+thigh, and with none of that fleet, rather sensitive lift of head,
+partly because his neck was shorter and not upflung as if so sensitive
+to the very rush of air that the flanges of the nostrils quivered.
+
+There was a more nervous organization to Bruce that gave him something
+of the startled look of wild horse, particularly with the laid-back
+Mercury wing effect to his hair.
+
+In anger Robert had a repertoire of oaths that stained the air like the
+trail of a wounded shark, his pupils receding to points and his mouth
+pulling to an oblique.
+
+Bruce, if anything, whitened and quieted. He had once, with hardly more
+than a lightning lunge, broken a truck driver's wrist in an office
+altercation over some manhandled scenery, and gone home rather sick
+because the fellow's opened cheek had bled down over his desk.
+
+His office manner was clipped, brisk, and highly impersonal. He
+cultivated a little mustache to enhance that manner, yet the two
+sixteen-year-old girls who pasted clippings into scrap books spitted
+their curls for him, and, since his advent, even Ida Blair had discarded
+her eye shade.
+
+In moments of high pressure he stuttered slightly, grinding and whirring
+over a sibilant like a stalled tire. Upon one occasion that was to be
+memorable Lilly sat between the brothers, notebook in lap, her head bent
+to dodge the fusillade of high words passing over it.
+
+It was her third year in a firm that had not slipped a cog. She had
+likened its growth to her child's--fine--sturdy--normal. There were
+seven theaters now, lying at points between New York and Denver, a
+quickening nervous system of them with New York its ganglia. An eighth
+had just been acquired, through which transaction she had endured with a
+vicarious anxiety that amazed her. There had been arduous after office
+hours of deed, mortgage, and bill of sale, and to growing demands had
+invested herself with power of notary public, proclaiming the same in a
+neat sign above her desk.
+
+It was the day of the consummation of this last deal, a Bronx Family
+Theater, in fact, that occurred between the brothers one of those
+bloodless chasms no wider than a sword blade, but hilt-deep.
+
+After a morning series of conferences with two representatives of
+Philadelphia capital and the vice president of a Surety Guarantee
+Company, Lilly in her new capacity thumping down on document after
+document that slid beneath her punch, the transfer was completed, and,
+bursting out into the corridor, rather hoyendish with elation, she drew
+up shortly to avoid collision with Robert Visigoth, himself still warm
+with the occasion.
+
+"Well," he said, slapping the side pockets of his waistcoat, "we pulled
+it off, didn't we?" The possibility of an evening train back to Chicago
+and of a big deal creditably accomplished quickening his well-being.
+
+"Indeed we did!" she replied, heartily.
+
+More and more, on these intermittent visits of his, the icy edge of her
+self-consciousness was beginning to thaw. Probably because the years had
+done their sebaceous worst with him. Somehow he had receded behind the
+dumpling of himself.
+
+"Have you seen this one of Rufus II, Mrs. Penny? I want to show you a
+picture of a youngster with some kick to him. Look at those legs,
+will you!"
+
+He had married, three years previous, a Miss Hindle Higginbothom, the
+only child of a Chicago leaf-lard magnate of household-word kind of
+fame, and brother-in-law to his father's one-time law partner, O.J.
+Higginbothom.
+
+For three years now, as if caught in a suet destiny, he had lived in the
+Lake Shore mansion of his father-in-law, making the Western city his
+official headquarters for as long as seven and eight-month periods.
+Ten, the year his first child was born.
+
+Often his wife accompanied him on his trips to New York. She was an
+enormous girl, looking ten years her senior, but with that fat kind of
+prettiness which asserts itself so often in clear skin and
+apple cheeks.
+
+Her capitulation to matrimony, rather than to Robert Visigoth, was
+complete. She was one of those inevitable mothers with little broody
+household ways that no immense wealth could dissipate. The first year
+there were twins. One of them died, but annually thereafter, until there
+were six, she presented a chuckling grandfather with a literal heir.
+Literal, because on each such nativity old Rufus Higginbothom, who had
+found it easier to make millions than to learn to write, signed his
+famous "X" to a five-hundred-thousand-dollar check of greeting to the
+new arrival.
+
+Robert Visigoth carried photographs of his babies and wife in a leather
+pocket portfolio, referring to it constantly and with a great show of
+casualness, "Oh, by the way, have I ever shown you--"
+
+Lilly returned this to him now, with a rush of amused pleasure at the
+bouncing rotundities of his newest born.
+
+"He's a darling!"
+
+"He was a little croupy before I left and I'm taking that six-three for
+Chicago, Mrs. Penny, and I wonder if you would do something for me. I'm
+caught empty-handed. Would you take a cab down to Ryan and Steger's (the
+wife says they are the best for stouts) and select me a couple of right
+nobby waists for her? Get the best, and you know pretty much about size.
+The largest--you know. A few pairs of black silk stockings, extra
+quality and extra size, would be nice, too. It would save me
+considerable rush."
+
+"I'll do my best."
+
+"Well, that will be a darn sight better than the wife's when it comes
+to clothes. She gets them tubby. Pick out something slick--on the order
+of what you've got on."
+
+"Why, this is only a two-dollar blouse!"
+
+He flipped her a one-hundred-dollar bill.
+
+"Don't come back with any change."
+
+Late in the afternoon of this day which had transmitted its tremor of
+large transaction throughout the offices, long since partitioned off
+into ground-glass cells and softened with sound-eating rugs, Lilly was
+summoned to the office of R.J., carrying with her the box containing her
+purchases. Bruce was there, too, pacing between windows.
+
+He met her up with an immediate inquiry.
+
+"Mrs. Penny, did you go up to see that 'June Blossom' sketch last
+night?"
+
+"Yes. I'm writing my report on it."
+
+Constantly now requests like this were tossed in the form of a pair of
+tickets on her desk.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Sweet, clean, and obvious."
+
+He nodded in a short corroborative manner he had, drawing up alongside
+the desk.
+
+"Take a telegram, please. 'Mr. Sam Sadler, People's Theater, Cleveland,
+Ohio. Book _June Blossom_ for week of nineteenth.' And now if you'll
+sign and stamp this mortgage after my brother and I sign."
+
+The box proved cumbersome, so before she took up pen she held it out to
+R.J.
+
+"The blouses," she said. "There is a blue and a maroon. I hope Mrs.
+Visigoth is going to like them. And here is the change."
+
+"That's mighty fine," he said, smiling until a second chin appeared. "A
+trinket or two up his sleeve gives a fellow a right to ring his own
+door bell."
+
+He reached then, fumbling at the hasps of his alligator bag which stood
+by, opening it out and stooping to insert the package.
+
+Simultaneously, as the mouth of that valise yawned, the two men leaped
+forward so that their heads came together resoundingly and absurdly, but
+not before the bag had exposed its surface articles: a pair of
+tortoise-shell military brushes, a packet of documents, and a precious
+silver and lapis-lazuli box about the dimensions of a playing card, the
+kind usually dedicated to such elusive addenda as stamps, collar
+buttons, or sewing box in a lady's overnight bag.
+
+From where she sat, shorthand book open, pencil poised, Lilly had
+observed it quite casually, although it was some time before she could
+co-ordinate it with what ensued.
+
+Suddenly there was the flash of the two men to their feet, R.J., an
+ox-blood surging into his face, kicking shut the valise, his brother
+whitening and quivering.
+
+"Why did you lie about that box!"
+
+"What do you mean?" said Robert, through his teeth, his color so livid
+that teeth and eyeballs seemed to whiten.
+
+His voice like the splitting of silk, Bruce plunged down a pointing
+forefinger toward the bag.
+
+"Open that up," he said.
+
+"The hell I will."
+
+With one swift stroke from the lighter and lither of them, the bag was
+on its side, spilling its contents of tortoise-shell hair brushes and
+the silver box, Bruce standing above it, tightening of jaw and knuckles.
+
+"Liar!" he cried. "Liar!"
+
+To Lilly it seemed that out of these years of apparently placid
+relationship, with something avuncular, even of father and son in it,
+here were suddenly and terribly Cain and Abel, elemental with an itch
+for each other's throat.
+
+"Say that again, by God! and you'll regret it."
+
+"Liar! Liar!" he reiterated over and over, standing and towering over
+the spilling bag. "Why did you lie to me about that box? Three years ago
+I asked you for it. The spring after her death. Just before the auction.
+Wasn't it sufficient that I let you and Pauline settle her personal
+effects between you? Only that little box--somehow I wanted it. Father
+gave it to her the first Christmas of their marriage. She always kept it
+on her table. You were welcome to all the rest between you. All I asked
+for was that little box of mother's. And to think that yesterday, the
+anniversary of her death, I mentioned it again. Liar! Liar! Lost! Never
+been found among her effects! Bah! Liar! It's a little thing, a trinket
+that she loved, but I wanted it. You hear, I wanted that trinket. She
+used to keep jelly beans in it for me when I came in from school. It's
+little--the littlest thing that ever happened between us, but it's the
+meanest, and God knows in my dealings with you all my life there have
+been enough of the little meannesses to contend with. But you have won
+your last mean little advantage outside this office. You and I can play
+the cards in business, particularly when we play them six hundred miles
+apart and where it is a case of man to man out on the mat. But outside
+this office we play quits! There aren't going to be any more nasty
+little personal issues with you, because there aren't going to be any
+at all. You're a liar and a hundred per cent bigger one over that little
+trinket of a box than if the stakes had been bigger. You hate to give,
+unless it's so much for so much. Your sense of fairness is vile! It's
+penny mean! Liar!"
+
+With a lowering of head Robert lunged then, his lips dragged to an
+oblique, threads of red cut in his eyeballs.
+
+"Eat those words or, by God! I'll ram them down your throat."
+
+"The hell I will."
+
+"Gentlemen!"
+
+They were crowded against the door, their breathing flowing against each
+other's face, gestures uplifted.
+
+Her eyes black and her notebook crushed up to her, Lilly's voice rang
+out like the crack of a whip, springing them apart. There were a
+whiteness and a sense of emptiness upon her and she wanted to crumple up
+rather sickly and cry, as if the blows had been diverted to her.
+
+They were suddenly and quiveringly themselves again, the panther laid.
+
+"You'll rue this," said Robert, walking back with some uncertainty of
+step to his desk, his eyes still slits.
+
+Bruce lifted the box rather tenderly, even with the greeny pallor of his
+rage still out and his features straining for composure.
+
+"I'll have it valued and send you a check--"
+
+"Damn you!" With snarl-shaped lips the older brother lunged again, this
+time their bodies meeting and swaying for clutch.
+
+"Bruce!"
+
+The use of his given name, the curdled quality to her voice, had their
+way. There was a moment of blank staring between the two men, of Bruce
+placing the box gently on the desk and walking out without slamming the
+door, and Robert sinking down into the swivel chair, trying to bring the
+oblique pull of his lips back to straight.
+
+"Get out," he said, without looking at her.
+
+She did, tiptoeing and fighting down the sense of sickness.
+
+And thus, out of a bauble of silver and lapis lazuli, was reared a tower
+of silence between these brothers as high as fifteen years is long.
+Large affairs for their joint unraveling lay ahead, dramatic in their
+magnitude. The Union Square Family Theater was very presently to become
+first a tawdry, then a discarded link in the glittering chain of
+playhouses that was to gird the country.
+
+Toward this end R.J. and Bruce Visigoth steered, with an impeccable
+oneness of purpose, the destinies of an enterprise audacious in its
+concept and ultimately to be spectacular in its fulfillment.
+
+But outside the sharply defined inclosures of their business lives, the
+brothers went down into a wordless vale of fifteen years of
+estrangement, not in enmity, but rather as a hatpin, plunged through the
+heart, can kill, bloodlessly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted
+offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's passions was a gale
+through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror
+of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a
+devastating one in a children's hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat
+down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible passions lay
+just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl
+aged four had once been found battered and dead beside a farm hand's
+dinner pail in St. Louis County! Suddenly all the faces she could
+conjure began to form staring circles around her--the Visigoths. Minnie
+Dupree. Ida Blair. Auchinloss. Phonzie. Phonzie!
+
+She decided to walk fast and long and ran downstairs out into the little
+areaway that ran like an alley from stage entrance to sidewalk. A newly
+installed nickelodeon, adjoining, was already lighted, throwing out a
+hard white shine and tinned music at the instance of five cents in the
+slot. In the glaring pallor Bruce Visigoth was suddenly at her side, his
+felt hat bunched up in his hand and his hair wet-looking, as if drenched
+with perspiration.
+
+"I couldn't let you go without apologizing, Mrs. Penny."
+
+She smiled with lips that would pull to the nervous impulse to cry.
+
+"The idea!" she said, feeling the words tawdry and provincial as they
+came.
+
+"It was my fault for permitting it to happen in the presence of a third
+party--you especially."
+
+"Those things cannot always be avoided," again biting down into her
+tongue for its banality.
+
+"Will you forget it as if it had never occurred?"
+
+She turned her gaze, that could be so singularly clear, full upon him.
+
+"It is already forgotten."
+
+Strangely enough and with unspoken accord they took to walking then at a
+clip that was almost a rush and created quite a wind in their faces. It
+was their first meeting out of office and here they were half running
+through a cool and winey half darkness and utterly without destination.
+
+She stopped abruptly at West Fourteenth Street, beyond the thunder of
+the Sixth Avenue Elevated and where the sky line began to dip down
+toward the piers.
+
+"Good night," she said, throwing back her head to look up at him from
+under the low brim of sailor.
+
+He whipped off his resiliently soft hat, hugging it under one arm.
+
+"Of course," he said, "of course," mopping at his forehead and so
+unstrung that she could have laughed. "I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. Is
+this where you live?"
+
+They were before a greasily lighted taxidermist's window of mounted
+raccoon, fox terrior with legs curled for running, and an owl on
+a branch.
+
+"No," she said, eying the owl, "I don't live here," and were both off
+into a gale of laughter that swept down the barriers of self-restraint.
+
+"We've both been walking it off," she said, easily. "Here is where I
+turn for home."
+
+He caught her hand.
+
+"D-don't go. I'd be so grateful--so grateful if you'd have dinner with
+me to-night."
+
+"Nonsense!" she said, amazed at her fluency of manner. "You're a bit
+unstrung, that's all. Look in at your club or a show."
+
+"Please."
+
+"All right," she said, suddenly, on a little click of teeth. "I'll
+come--this once."
+
+"You're a brick," he cried, releasing her hand with a grateful pressure.
+
+She was excited out of all proportions to the event, flushing up with a
+sense of adventure and crowded moment.
+
+He began to scan for a cab.
+
+"Let's walk."
+
+"Not a bit of it," bringing one down with a cane. "We're out on a
+party."
+
+"But--"
+
+"No buts," helping her in and climbing in after. "Waldorf."
+
+"I'm too shirtwaisted."
+
+"Nothing of the kind. You're as trim as a dime. I like those waists you
+wear. They make you look smooth--shining. That's it, you've a shine
+to you."
+
+The odor of another drive in an open cab through this same snarl of
+traffic was winding about her like mist. That doctor's outer office with
+its row of thoughtful chairs. Rembrandt's "Night-Watch." That frenzied
+moment of finding the lock! The run up two flights. She sat forward on
+the slippery leather seat.
+
+"I--I shouldn't have come."
+
+"If you're serious, of course I'll take you home. But I can't tell you
+how much I want you not to feel that way."
+
+She sat back again.
+
+"I'm behaving like a shop girl."
+
+They both laughed again and complete thaw set in.
+
+He selected one of the lesser dining rooms where the formality of
+evening clothes was still the rule, but here and there a couple like
+themselves, in street attire. It was her first New York meal that was
+not read off a badly thumbed menu and eaten off thick-lipped china. A
+stringed orchestra played the Duo of Parsifal and Kundry, which was
+enough to set the blood rocking in her veins and some of its bombastic
+maternal passion to dye her face.
+
+He ordered a man's dinner: Clear soup with croutons. Long oysters on the
+half shell. A thick steak with potatoes deliciously concocted beneath a
+crust of cheese. Light wine. Ices in long glasses as slender as the neck
+of a crane. Turkish coffee brewed at the table over alcohol.
+
+She sighed out finally, warm with well-being: "I didn't realize how
+deadly tired I was of just--grub. You see, it's the first time I've
+dined at a first-class place since I'm in New York."
+
+"You don't mean that."
+
+She nodded, smiling.
+
+"I think I'm as surprised as you are. It's just one of the things that
+never occurred to me."
+
+He regarded her for a long moment and without smile.
+
+"You queer, queer girl."
+
+"If anyone tells me that again, I'll begin to believe it is my
+inevitable epitaph."
+
+"No epitaph is inevitable. It is what you write it."
+
+She leaned her chin into the cup of her palm.
+
+"Do you think that?"
+
+"Yes, and therefore yours should embody courage and dauntless idealism
+and love of truth."
+
+She looked off through the atmosphere that was talcy with soft odors and
+the warm perfume of bare shoulders.
+
+"Love of truth," she said, her eyes lit, "would be enough."
+
+"Love of you, would be an epitaph to my liking."
+
+She was afraid he could see the little beating at her throat and wanted
+to be facetious. Poor Lilly, to whom persiflage came none too readily.
+
+"Now, you're making sport of me."
+
+"Probably it is a case of laugh that I may not weep."
+
+"Even tears can be idle."
+
+"Or idolizing."
+
+"I suppose I am to surmise over the quality of yours?"
+
+"Well, you have had me guessing for three years. Mrs. Penny. Lilly! I
+can't say the other, it--won't s-say itself."
+
+She asked her question with a cessation of her entire being, as if her
+heart had missed a beat.
+
+"Hasn't--your--brother--told--you--anything?"
+
+"Oh yes. I know how you threw over the professional end of it for what
+you decided you could do better. I thought that pretty plucky; so many
+of us mistake inflated judgment for genius and stubbornness for
+perseverance, when that same perseverance applied to the job within
+one's capacity may lead to fine fulfillment."
+
+"It's good to hear you say that."
+
+"But that is about all I do know--Lilly--except, of course, that there
+is a youngster and somewhere in the background a husband whom I would
+like to meet out some dark night when I happen to be wearing my favorite
+pair of brass knuckles."
+
+Something nameless and shapeless had lifted; there was a gavotte to her
+heartbeat.
+
+"My husband was--is a good man."
+
+"But not a wise one if he couldn't hold a creature like you."
+
+"And my child! You talk about shine! Of course I know it is only her
+hair and eyes and now her little teeth, but sometimes it seems to me
+there is an actual iridescence to her. Just as real as the gold circlets
+the Italians loved to paint about heads they adored."
+
+"Your head is--"
+
+"You see, the fuzz of her curls gives that effect. Those new
+stereopticon views that move, that we used on the bills last week, show
+it--that aura off the hair. Even the nurses and Mrs. Dupree have
+remarked Zoe's. She's really the show child of the place, you know."
+
+"By inheritance?"
+
+"No. She's only like me about the eyes, and like--him--in the honey
+color of her hair. Hers is as brilliant and curly as mine is dull and
+smooth. And she's so big. So golden and burstingly big. I can't look at
+her without fairly gasping, 'can this be mine'!"
+
+"And to think a man let you go, once he had you captured."
+
+"He didn't let go. I went. I can never hear him referred to slightingly
+without feeling myself a rotter not to explain. My husband was so
+terribly all he should have been, Mr. Visigoth. As decent and
+God-fearing a man as ever--chewed his beefsteak with his temples."
+
+He threw back his head for one of his sustained laughs.
+
+"It's horrid of me to belittle him. Let me explain further."
+
+"Lord! you don't need to. I know everything about him there is to know.
+A fine, hefty truck horse trying to do teamwork with a red-nostriled
+filly."
+
+"I--I think that's it--I've never been able to get it across to anyone
+before, but--"
+
+"He was just cast wrong. That's all there is to be said against the
+chap. Right?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"I understand. In a way I'm in a similar position with my own brother.
+Only, I've stuck it out because it was my mother's great wish to see us
+get on together. After what you have observed these years, particularly
+to-day, none of this can be particularly new to you."
+
+"I've noticed, of course, you--you're different."
+
+"It is the little things about Robert I cannot swallow. Never could. He
+is the better business man and keeps my head out of the clouds, but many
+a time I've wanted to duck these years of apprenticeship and produce the
+things I believe in. I will some day, but that is another story. Robert
+has vision. His sense of land and theater values is unfailing. He--"
+
+"Well, so is your vision just as unfailing in your work. The chain
+didn't even begin to form before you took over the booking end."
+
+"He has fine traits, too. Big ones. His word is his bond. He has
+business foresight and integrity, but somehow it is his little
+meannesses. I remember once in my father's house he took a thrashing for
+something outrageous he was not guilty of, because he had promised some
+youngster across the way he would shield him, come what might, and
+somehow I thought it pretty fine of him. But another time he let me take
+a thrashing for something he had done and stood by without opening his
+mouth. It is those indescribable smallnesses in his make-up. Once when I
+was in favor of branching out and producing a legitimate three-act play
+which I happened to run across--a rare thing from the French--he--well,
+I won't go into it--but this thing--to-night--that bauble of my
+mother's--it--it's the climax of a lifetime of such flea bites--a trifle
+hardly worth the mentioning, and yet--it's the most utter--the most
+damnable--"
+
+There was a half crash of his clenched hand among the silver and a rise
+of suffusing red up out of the white of his soft collar.
+
+"I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to let you in for any more of it. I'm
+sorry. And after you were gracious enough to come alone, too. Come, here
+is to making this little party a gay one."
+
+He held up his glass. "Here's to the shining child."
+
+"Oh!" she cried, and drank quickly.
+
+"Like it?"
+
+"Not much. It burns."
+
+"You should see your eyes."
+
+"You should see hers."
+
+"Whose?"
+
+"My child's."
+
+"Do you know what I should have done in your husband's place?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Harnessed you, too, but to a moonbeam."
+
+"I once knew a man to whom I never spoke ten words in all my life, and
+yet I always imagined he might have talked to me like that--not
+literally--not in terms of tin dippers."
+
+"Of what, you queer, queer girl?"
+
+"Now I know of whom you remind me! An old school-teacher I once had.
+Odd."
+
+"I would never have let you slip my harness through."
+
+"And have deprived the Amusement Enterprise Company of my austere
+services!"
+
+"You've been invaluable. Ninety per cent of your judgments have been
+ninety-nine per cent there!"
+
+"Luck."
+
+"Luck nonsense! Judgment isn't horseshoe-shaped."
+
+"I love it! Feeling the public pulse for what it wants. The psychology
+of your vaudeville audience is as elementary as a primer and as
+intricate as life. It is a bloodhound when it comes to detecting the
+false from the true. Take that little sketch, 'Trapped,' you sent me out
+to see last week. A more sophisticated audience might have mistaken its
+brittle epigrammatic quality for brilliancy and its flippancy for
+cleverness. But not your ten-twenty-thirty's. In real life a husband
+doesn't psychanalyze his wife's lover. He horsewhips him. And that
+lovely blank-verse fantasy that you attempted on your own. That is the
+sort of thing you are going to stand for some day in the theater. I
+loved your wanting it. But right now, while you are on your way up to
+the goal, is where I come in. Sort of mediator between your ideals and
+the box office. Of course you loved the fantasy. So did I, and I loved
+your wanting to do it. But it took vaudeville just one performance to
+decide that it wasn't ready for that kind of mysticism."
+
+"And you forty minutes."
+
+"You would never have backed it even over my O.K."
+
+"Then you don't realize how far your O.K. goes with me."
+
+"What is this," she smiled, "a mutual-admiration fete?"
+
+"I don't know," suddenly leaning toward her, reddening. "I can only
+speak for myself. Lilly--you're wonderful--"
+
+She chose to be casual, most effectively, too.
+
+"Indeed it is mutual. I need hardly to tell you what association with
+your office has meant to me. The romance of an organization like yours.
+The thrill of seeing it triple proportions in these few years. The fine
+stimulating something that comes with the acquisition of each new
+Amusement Enterprise Theater. The chats we have had over plays, play
+writing, producing. Your own fine aim. Oh, it has made bearable even the
+monotony of the secretarial end of it!"
+
+"I am afraid your secretarial services are about to be dispensed with."
+
+She placed a quick hand to her heart.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+He flecked his cigar, laughing over at her.
+
+"You're delicious. What could I mean except that you have outgrown your
+job?"
+
+"You--mean--"
+
+"I mean that I am going to officially place you in charge of the booking
+department at--well, your own idea of salary."
+
+"I--I don't know what to say."
+
+"Don't say anything."
+
+"You can't know--"
+
+"I do know."
+
+"You see, she is almost four now, and beautifully cared for, but, now
+that her little mind is beginning to unfold--I--Oh, to be able to afford
+a place of my own--next year--when she has outgrown Mrs. Dupree's. You
+see, I've never really had her. I've such plans for the day when I can
+have her rearing all to myself. I want life to unfold so naturally to
+her. Like a flower. That's why I am so terribly jealous of every day we
+spend apart. That's why you--you cannot know what it means to have you
+tell me that I've made good. It means that the time is nearing for me to
+have her with me, to--to--Well, you cannot--cannot know!"
+
+She sat back, feeling foolish because her eyes were filling and trying
+to smile back the tears.
+
+He reached over to place his palms over her hand.
+
+"How rightly named you are! 'Lilly.' One of those big, milky-spathed,
+calla lilies. Calla Lilly."
+
+"We'll be going now," she said, feeling for her jacket.
+
+They rode down to Eleventh Street in a cab, almost silently, and as she
+sat looking out, unsmiling, she could feel his gaze burn her profile.
+
+He left her at the stoop, standing bareheaded.
+
+"You've saved me from an evening of horrors."
+
+"I'm glad."
+
+"You're not angry--Calla Lilly?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"How soon again?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Yes, yes!"
+
+"No."
+
+And somehow the word was like a plummet deep into the years ahead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+One hot Saturday afternoon, at least a twelvemonth later, as Lilly was
+rushing down from the children's department of one of Broadway's
+gigantic cut-rate department stores, she stopped so abruptly that she
+created a little throwback in the sidewalk jam.
+
+Her miracle was broken. Her first impulse even now was to dart back, but
+the tow of the crowd was strong, and, besides, she was suddenly eye to
+eye with an exceedingly thin youth with a very long neck rising far
+above a high collar, a pasty and slightly pimpled face evidently slow to
+beard, and a soft hat pulled down over meek light-blue eyes, himself
+even more inclined to push on than she.
+
+It was her first encounter since her clean cleavage from a strangely
+remote dream phase of her existence. For the first three years she had
+carried about a fear of some such meeting, a passer-by brushing her
+shoulders or a sense of presence at her back sending a shock through
+her. Once she had hurriedly left a Subway train because of a fancied
+likeness to Roy Kemble in a young fellow across the aisle. Even now
+there were days when fancied resemblances seem to people the crowds.
+
+"Why, Harry Calvert!"
+
+"Hello," he said in the tempo of no great surprise, but purpling up into
+his lightish hair. "I know you. You're Lilly Becker."
+
+"Harry, I cannot believe my eyes! I haven't seen you since you were in
+knickers. And to think we remembered each other! Come here a minute out
+of the crowd. I want to talk to you."
+
+He followed her with some reluctance and a great sheepishness out of
+Broadway into quieter Thirty-fourth Street, twirling his hat, his
+nervousness growing.
+
+"You look fine, Lilly."
+
+"What are you doing here, Harry? How is your grandma? St. Louis?"
+
+She could have embraced, cried over him, the loneliness of years seeming
+to rush to a head.
+
+"Gramaw and I live here."
+
+"Harry, not really!"
+
+"Nearly two years, now."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"'Way out near Tremont Avenue."
+
+"And you, Harry, what do you do?"
+
+"I was window dresser for a gents' furnishing store up to a few weeks
+ago, but it--it changed hands. I'm out of a job right now."
+
+"Harry, do you ever hear from--home?"
+
+"No, Miss Lilly, we never see anyone from there. You're the first."
+
+"I'll tell you what. I'm going home with you. Take me out with you to
+visit your grandma. I haven't seen her in years--it's been so long
+ago--everything."
+
+He was wringing his hat now and shifting.
+
+"It's a long way out, Lilly. It's hardly built up out there at all."
+
+"I don't care. I'll buy some pastries on the way and we will make a
+party of it. Does she still keep boarders?"
+
+"Roomers."
+
+"Poor, dear Mrs. Schum, fancy her living here!"
+
+They rode out on a surface car, changing twice and jammed face to face
+on a rear platform, a brilliant pink out in her face.
+
+"Harry, I just cannot realize it. You a full-fledged man!"
+
+"I'm twenty-four."
+
+"What is that yellow on your fingers? Not from smoking?"
+
+"I used to a lot, but not now."
+
+"Is your grandmother just as wrapped up in you as ever, Harry? Poor
+dear!"
+
+"Yes, she is. You sure look fine, Lilly. You're pretty!"
+
+"And what in the world brought you to New York and what ever became of
+Mr. Hazzard and--"
+
+"Oh, gramaw read in the paper once that he died of that sore on his
+face."
+
+"And old Willie and Mr. Keebil and Snow Horton--ever see any of them,
+Harry?"
+
+"No; you see it is nearly two years since--"
+
+"I have a little daughter--almost five years old!"
+
+"Gramaw followed up in the papers when you were married. Flora Kemble
+and Roy, they're both married, too."
+
+"Harry, didn't you ever hear anything about--well, about my marriage?"
+
+"Yes, there was something about it. I forget. You live in New York?"
+
+"Yes, and, Harry, don't say anything when we get to your home. Just let
+me walk in and surprise her."
+
+"Yes."
+
+More and more she noticed his indoor whiteness and the eyelids which
+would twitch nervously.
+
+"Do you keep well, Harry?"
+
+"Fairly."
+
+There was quite a walk from the car, across a viaduct, down a flight of
+steps, and into a steep new street of flimsy-looking apartment houses of
+the dawning era of vertical homes. But the Harlem River, neat as a
+canal, flowed within easy view and there was something very scoured
+about the expression of the just graded street of occasional vacant
+lots, showing the first break in the continuity of city brick that
+Lilly's tired eyes had encountered.
+
+"Why, Harry, I've never been away out here before! How nice and clean!"
+
+"Here we are."
+
+They entered one of the tan-brick buildings, "El Dorado" writ in elegant
+gilt script across the transom. Then up three flights of clean, new,
+fireproof stairs, Harry inserting his key into one of the two doors that
+faced the landing.
+
+"Sh-h-h, Harry! Tell her it is just a friend."
+
+Old odors laden with memory rushed to meet her; that pungency which,
+unaccountably enough, reeks of the cold boiled potato, and which old
+upholsteries, windowless hallways, and frequent meat stews can generate.
+
+There was a blob of low-pressure gaslight in the hallway, a weak and
+watery eye burning from a side bracket into the odor so poignant with
+association. Tony Eli drowned at eighteen. Her father peering behind the
+dresser. "Where's Lilly?" "Here I am!" Herself hugging up her knees in
+their stout ribbed stockings, her round gaze on the red-glass globe with
+the warts blown into it.
+
+There it was, that same glass globe around the puny light; and the
+hatrack--the one with the seat that opened for rubbers and school bags.
+
+"Gramaw, come out. Here is some one."
+
+A long cooking fork in her hand, and a puff of steam hissing out after
+her, Mrs. Schum peered into the hallway. She was strangely smaller,
+Lilly thought, as if the flesh were beginning to wither off the rack of
+her bones.
+
+"Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum!"
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+"Come out, gramaw. It's no one to be afraid of."
+
+"Harry!" Her voice came cracking out like a shot. "Harry, are you in
+trouble?"
+
+"No--no--"
+
+"Who is hounding you? If you are here about my grandson, madam, they are
+all the time trying to get the best of my boy. He hasn't broken parole
+since old Judge Delahanty down in the Twenty-third Street Court--"
+
+"Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum! Don't you know me? Please! Think, dearie,
+the little girl out in St. Louis who used to plague you for bread
+and butter--"
+
+The old face loosened, the eyes peering through spectacles held across
+the nose with a bit of twine.
+
+"It isn't--Lilly--Becker?"
+
+"Right the first time, gramaw!"
+
+"Bless my heart! Bless my soul! Let me sit down. I'm right weak. Little
+Lilly--Becker!"
+
+They embraced there in a hallway hardly wide enough to contain them.
+These two, who ordinarily might have met again, after such a span of
+years, in the mildest of reunions, here in each other's arms, hungrily,
+heartbeat to heartbeat.
+
+"Lilly, Lilly, come in here and let me look at you. Light up the front
+room, Harry. Well, I declare! Let me sit down. I'm right weak-kneed.
+Law! pretty is no name! Well, I declare!"
+
+In the little front room of chromos, folding bed with desk attachment,
+a bisque knickknack or two, they were finally knee to knee, Lilly's hat
+tossed aside, her hands clasping the old veiny ones.
+
+"Begin at the beginning, Mrs. Schum. Everything. First, tell me, dear,
+how long since you have heard of my folks?"
+
+"Harry, you go out in the kitchen and keep the things warm until gramaw
+comes out to dish up. Set the table with a cloth on, and run over to the
+delicatessen for a bit of cold cuts. He's a right smart help to me,
+Lilly. Not like some boys, too proud to help. And now--now--let me
+see--why, it's two years since I met your mother downtown in St. Louis
+before I had any idea of coming here."
+
+"How did she look?"
+
+"Splendid. She was with one of her euchre friends, so I didn't have the
+chance for an old-time chat, but she made me promise to come and see
+her, and 'pon my word, just as young and pretty as you please, with a
+fine face veil and a purple feather boa and shopping out of the Busy Bee
+bins just the way she used to do."
+
+"She looked--happy?"
+
+"Indeed she did! Buying some menfolk stuff. Wool socks, I think she
+said, for your father, was it, who is subject to colds in the head--"
+
+"No, those weren't for papa. Oh, Mrs. Schum, it's so good to hear of her
+first hand like this! What--what did she say about me?"
+
+"Told me about you off here studying opera, and your husband was making
+his home with them. I--I took it from what she said you were none too
+happy with him, but I had no idea of your being here still! Aren't
+things well with you, Lilly? I always said you reminded me of my Annie,
+and she would have turned out something big if she had lived. I expect
+it of you, too, Lilly."
+
+"What else?"
+
+"She put up a bold front with me, I will say that, never letting on that
+there had been trouble. And then just before I left--we came away mighty
+unexpectedly--Katy Stutz--"
+
+"Katy Stutz--"
+
+"Yes, came to sew for a family I had boarding with me, and she said she
+heard you had left him for good and that your parents took sides with
+your husband and had him in their home, occupying your very room, and
+that your mother was as fussy over him as she ever was over you, babying
+him to death. Lilly, Lilly, what is wrong with you?"
+
+"And my father, Mrs. Schum?"
+
+"Fine. Mary says he's a bit whiter, but not a whit changed. He's done
+well in the rope business, hasn't he? Although I always say it was your
+mother's practical ways got him on his feet, and from what I understand
+that young man you married has given him many a lift. They've gone in
+business together, haven't they? They tell me, Lilly, there is not a
+steadier or more advancing young man than yours. Ah me, the ways of
+young ones are strange I guess you haven't heard about Harry, either?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He's a good boy, Harry is, Lilly, but I've been through trouble with
+him. That's the reason for our being here. You see, Lilly, him being a
+poor orphan all his life, they're all against him. The little fellow
+never had the right raising, knocking around with all those nigger
+servants, and me with never the time to do for him."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Schum, how can you! Why, there wasn't any of the youngsters
+in the boarding house had a sweeter influence over him than Harry."
+
+"No, no. It was all my fault. I was too pressed trying to make ends
+meet. I should have given up that big house years ago for a few roomers
+like now. He got in bad ways, Lilly. Not noisy and with gangs like some
+rough boys would. But quiet--solitary-like. I never knew him to hang
+around with that gang of boys that used to loaf over at Pirney's drug
+store or anything like that, but after the Kembles and you folks left,
+Harry got to stealing, Lilly. Little things. The child never took
+anything more than a bit of lead pipe from Quinn's empty house across
+the street, and once a little silver trinket from a milliner I had up in
+the third floor front--"
+
+"He used to do little things like that when he was a child, don't you
+remember, dear?"
+
+"It's his father in him, Lilly. Maybe you don't know it, but that's what
+killed my Annie, that same streak which was the ruination of a fine,
+educated man like his father. But Harry's got too much of his mother in
+him to be all bad; he--"
+
+"Of course he has, dear."
+
+"To get back to our coming East, Lilly. One night he--Harry brought me
+home a brooch, Lilly. A right pretty gold one with a garnet in. It used
+to hurt him that I never had any finery. He wouldn't take anything to
+buy drink and bad times for himself like other boys, but he'd steal
+something to bring home to his old grandmother. All that night, Lilly,
+down there in the basement kitchen, I was nearly crazy trying to get out
+of him where he got that brooch. The next day they was after him, for it
+and some--nickel-plated facets from out of the washroom where he was
+working. They hushed it up. Old Judge Mayer, you remember his sister
+used to board with me. But the next time there was a little
+trouble--this time a--a little finger ring--not even all gold. I--we--we
+had to sell out and come here--where we could be swallowed up."
+
+"Oh, Harry, Harry, how could he!"
+
+"Wasn't his fault. It wasn't the place for him out there any more with
+everybody against a poor orphan. I've cut him off, Lilly, from his bad
+ways out there. You're the first I've seen or heard of since we left,
+and I don't want you to even write it to your folks that we're here.
+There's the little matter of that ring--not even all gold--and--some
+lead pipe--forgotten, now--please God, but they might want him back for
+it--that's how down on him they are. He's a good boy, Harry is, Lilly,
+with respect for his grandmother. He's had a slip up or two, but the
+best of us have that, haven't we?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It's to be expected. A boy can't shake off his inheritance overnight,
+can he? Can he?"
+
+"No, I suppose not, dear."
+
+"Don't let on, Lilly. He's sensitive. We'll win yet, Harry and me will.
+The world hasn't taken much stock of a poor little basement orphan, but
+with the kind of mother he had, his grandmother will live yet to see the
+day that it does take account of him. Harry's right smart with draping
+and decorating around the house, and if I do say it, when he dresses a
+window the traffic stops. He's a great one for reading and following up
+the magazines, too. Smart. I'd stake my all on a boy that has got it in
+him to treat his grandmother with the gentleness he does. And children!
+There is not one on the street he can pass for love of them. A boy like
+that cannot be all bad, can he, Lilly?"
+
+Her eyes magnified with the glaze of tears so that one blink would have
+overflowed them, Lilly laid her lips to the veiny old hand, her voice
+down into the lap of blue-checkered apron.
+
+"We mothers--Mrs. Schum--God, how we love to suffer to them!"
+
+"We!"
+
+Her face in the tired old lap, the little room seeming to crowd up with
+voice, Lilly talked on then, until the little clock inset into a china
+plate ticked out an hour, and in the kitchen, Harry, with all his old
+capacity for meekness, lay asleep with his head in his arms and the
+little dinner cloying on the stove.
+
+"I'm afraid my old brain don't take it all in, Lilly. You mean your
+mother--father--none of them--know?"
+
+"It isn't for you to understand, dear. The mere telling of it has
+somehow eased things. We are bits of seaweed, dear Mrs. Schum, tossed up
+on the same shores. You and your fugitive from environment. Me and mine.
+If your secret is to be mine, mine must be yours."
+
+"God have mercy on you, Lilly, wherever it is your ways are leading
+you."
+
+"He has had, Mrs. Schum."
+
+"I don't know. I don't know. You know best, I guess, what is in your
+heart."
+
+"I do. It's this. Why can't you take--us?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"I want her with me. She is getting big enough for the kind of training
+I have all mapped out for her. And now you--it's nothing short of
+destiny led me to you. I could put her in day school. Can take her
+myself in the mornings, say, and you, dear Mrs. Schum, are to call for
+her? I can pay, I can help you and you can help me. Later we may take a
+larger place with extra room. Mrs. Schum, don't you see, we've been
+thrown together!"
+
+"Why, Lilly--I believe--I do."
+
+It was after ten o'clock when, over a belated little meal, they ceased
+their planning. Eleven, when Harry finally walked with her across the
+viaduct to the street car. Stars were out. Thick white ones. She skipped
+a little, ran a little, and stood a moment at the parapet, looking down
+at the lights which followed the narrow course of the river. She felt
+suddenly wild for bauble. Her flesh, which never particularly craved the
+lay of fine fabric, felt cheated. She wanted to wind her body to its
+utmost flexuosity, bare her throat to the wind, and fling out a gesture
+the width of Vegas to Capella.
+
+At the corner she took Harry's face between her hands, kissing him
+soundly on the lips.
+
+"Good night, Harry, and God bless you for letting me find you."
+
+Long after that kiss, ever so lightly bestowed, lay burning against his
+lips and she had boarded the street car, he stood looking after, with
+his very light-blue eyes.
+
+
+
+
+Book Three
+
+
+THE WINE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+When Zoe Penny was still in knee frocks she graduated, first in her
+class, from the public grade school. It was a period of great stress for
+Lilly, of happy shopping and the sweet anxieties of ribbon and frock,
+and there were always two high circles of color out on her cheeks, and
+from time to time she would force herself to sit down, uncurl her
+fingers of their tensity, as Ida Blair had taught her, and thus,
+starting in at the hands, try to relax.
+
+After two or three moves from the makeshift of the Tremont Avenue
+apartment, they were finally installed in an old brownstone walk-up
+house in West Ninety-third Street, a stone's throw removed from an
+avenue of Elevated structure and petty shops, but with a quiet enough,
+if gloomy, dignity. One of those tunnel dwellings, the light from the
+front room and kitchen gradually petering out into a middle room of
+almost absolute darkness.
+
+Lilly and her daughter occupied what corresponded to the parlor, a room
+of white woodwork, flimsy white mantelpiece, and gilded radiator; one of
+the vertical layers and layers of just such city parlors. Two narrow
+front windows looked down into Ninety-third Street and there were closed
+white folding doors with again a rented piano against them. A pretty
+screen of Japanese paper with a sprig of wistaria across it shut off a
+bureau with a layout of much juvenile claptrap of hair ribbons, side
+combs, and the worthless treasures of childhood. Between the windows a
+"lady's" desk with hinged writing slab, really Lilly's, but mostly the
+dangling place for a pair of Zoe's roller skates and its pigeonholes
+bulging with her daughter's somewhat extraneous matter. But there were a
+two-tone brown rug, and yellow silk curtains saved the room from the
+iniquitous Nottingham and Axminster school of interior defamation. The
+walls, too, were tempered of their whiteness by brown prints of the
+"Coliseum by Night," "The Age of Innocence," and Watt's "Hope,"
+blindfolded, atop the world.
+
+These pictures had been shopped one Saturday afternoon at the cut-rate
+department store and were largely Zoe's choice, happily corroborated
+by Lilly.
+
+"Remarkable selections for a miss," said the clerk.
+
+"Do you really think so?" cried Lilly, herself turning away from an
+inclination toward the more chromatic and immediately exhilarated out of
+a state of fatigue.
+
+"Zoe, you're wonderful!"
+
+"You're wonderful, too, Lilly."
+
+There had been scarcely any baby talk.
+
+At three, it was "Zoe, are you happy to see mother this week-end?"
+
+"Ees, ummie."
+
+And then one day out of the pellucid sky of babyhood, in answer to this
+invariable query, it was:
+
+"Yes, Lilly," so suddenly that something seemed to catch at her
+heartbeat, but after a pang she let it stand.
+
+Let Lilly's Zoe dawn upon you through this rather typical conversation
+between them, the night before the graduation from grade school:
+
+"Lilly, am I beautiful?"
+
+"Why, yes, Zoe, so long as you remain fine and unspoiled by it. That is
+the rarest kind of loveliness--inner beauty."
+
+"I don't mean that kind. Am I pretty--for boys to look at?"
+
+"You are pretty enough as little girls go, if that is what you mean."
+
+"Is it wrong to have beaus?"
+
+"That all depends. Why?"
+
+"Oh, I just wanted to know."
+
+Silence.
+
+"A boy in my class, Gerald Prang, says he is my beau."
+
+"Silly fellow."
+
+"Ethel Watts has one. They kiss."
+
+"That's horrid."
+
+"Is it horrid for me and Ethel to kiss?"
+
+"No, Zoe, you know it isn't."
+
+"Would it be horrid for me and Gerald--Gerald and I--to kiss?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Listen, Zoe, a new word. The most beautiful and the most horrible thing
+in the world can be sex."
+
+"Sex?"
+
+"Yes, dear. We haven't used the term in our talks--yet."
+
+"Isn't it nice?"
+
+"That lies with you."
+
+"Then what is sex?"
+
+"Zoe, the world of human beings is divided into two great classes, isn't
+it? Boys and girls."
+
+"Oh, I know! It's me and Gerald."
+
+"In a way, yes, but--"
+
+"If me and Ethel kiss, it isn't sex, but if me and Gerald kiss, it is."
+
+"If only you wouldn't keep your mind running ahead. I want to be so
+sure you are going to understand. That's what our botany and physiology
+study has been for. To prepare you to understand. Now take the kingdom
+of flowers, a rose, for instance--"
+
+"Begin with us, Lilly. I don't want to hear any botany."
+
+"But, Zoe--"
+
+"Storks cannot bring babies, can they?"
+
+"No. No. Who put such silly nonsense into your head? Don't let that
+stupid fable hide from you the beautiful truth of birth. That is an
+absurd story, Zoe, invented by those to whom the most sublime fact in
+the world seems nasty. Babies are born, dear--out of lo--out of the
+union of the sexes."
+
+"Lilly, you are all trembling."
+
+She took her daughter's face between her hands, her eyes probing and
+yearning down into the brilliantly blue ones.
+
+"It is because I want to keep life clean and beautiful for you. Nothing
+that is natural is ugly, Zoe. It's only when we make something dark and
+shameful of nature's methods that we are apt to misunderstand and
+to err."
+
+"Did you err, Lilly?"
+
+"How?"
+
+"With him?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Penny."
+
+"Zoe! Zoe! why will you refer to him that way? Yes, I erred out of
+ignorance, the kind I want to save you from. In my case your father had
+to pay for the ignorance of a girl who married him without knowing what
+marriage meant. Ignorance!"
+
+"How funny to hear that--word."
+
+"What word?"
+
+"Father."
+
+"Zoe! Zoe! Have I made it clear to you about him? How good--how
+kind--how wronged by me?"
+
+"You are always so afraid I won't understand that. Why shouldn't I?"
+
+"Because it is hard, dear, for you to grasp it all--especially its
+effect upon you. Some day you will understand how gradually I have tried
+to prepare your mind to judge me. Even this little graduation to-morrow
+is a milestone and makes me want to talk to you just a wee bit plainer.
+Zoe, I--Zoe, does--does--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Does it ever make you unhappy among the other children to be questioned
+about your--father?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you ever feel that you would like to see him?".
+
+"No."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because he is dull. He would spoil things for us."
+
+"But doesn't it ever seem terrible to you, Zoe, that I haven't given you
+the opportunity to judge him for yourself? If the day ever
+comes--to-day, tomorrow, next year--that you want your father, you
+understand, dear, don't you, that I will be the first to--"
+
+"I tell you No! No! Why do you always keep telling me that? No! No! It's
+better his not knowing there is a me! He makes me feel all suffocated up
+the way he did you. I couldn't stand it. I want to be what I want
+to be!"
+
+"Oh, want it badly enough then, Zoe; want it badly enough!"
+
+"The greatest singer in the world! That's what I want to be, and stand
+on a stage with all the music there is around me as if I was in the
+middle of an ocean of it. Lilly, will you take me to another matinee to
+see Bernhardt? She makes me feel what I want to be. Just--just her being
+what she--is makes me--want to be what I--am."
+
+"You funny muddled youngster! Why, you didn't understand either what she
+said or what the play was about."
+
+"I didn't need to. It was her voice. Something she says with her voice
+that I feel inside of me, only I can't say it. I wanted to cry. Isn't it
+queer, Lilly, to feel so happy you want to cry? Oh, I've learned a new
+one--only my voice won't say it the way I feel it. It's in our school
+Wordsworth. Something inside of me cries all the time I'm saying it:
+
+     "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
+      The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
+        Hath elsewhere had its setting,
+        And cometh from afar;
+        Not in entire forgetfulness,
+        And not in utter nakedness,
+      But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+        From God, Who is our home.
+
+"Oh, Lilly--Lilly--I love that!--trailing clouds of glory--"
+
+"You recited it beautifully, darling. See, you've made me cry."
+
+"And I--I love you, Lilly. Hold me tight. I love you."
+
+"My baby."
+
+"Lilly, will you be--angry if I ask you something?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Why--do you cry in the night sometimes?"
+
+"Why, Zoe! Do I?"
+
+"You know you do. I can feel you crying, and sometimes when I touch your
+face--"
+
+"Why, child--that's just my way. At night--things can be so real--so
+terribly real. It is something you cannot understand yet."
+
+"Do I make you sad?"
+
+"No! No! No! My light, my life."
+
+"Is it--Bruce?"
+
+"Why, child--you talk nonsense! Don't speak of him as Bruce."
+
+"I hate calling him Mr. Visigoth. It sounds--meek. I won't be meek! Are
+you sure, Lilly, it isn't him--he?"
+
+"Why, child, in Heaven's name should it be?"
+
+"He looks at you so, Lilly. Maybe he makes you cry the way Bernhardt
+makes me cry. By what he doesn't say. Saturday afternoons when I call
+for you--he looks at you so when you're not looking."
+
+"Why shouldn't he? We've worked together for all these years."
+
+"You and he, when you stand up together you look so--so--_right_."
+
+"Zoe, you are talking nonsense."
+
+"But you're all red, aren't you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Was it sex to say that?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you glad he is coming to-night?"
+
+"Mr. Visigoth and I have business together, Zoe. We cannot sit around in
+public places and discuss matters. I'm reading Mrs. Blair's play to him.
+Go to bed now, dear."
+
+"Mayn't I stay up?"
+
+"No."
+
+Her child looked up at her, chin cupped in her small hand and crystals
+of light out in her eyes.
+
+"Please, Lilly--why do you cry?"
+
+"Why, darling, I don't cry because of anything you are quite ready to
+understand. You know that, don't you, dear? There is nothing mother
+won't talk over with you as soon as you are ready to take it all in.
+That is part of her scheme for keeping life beautiful and free of rude
+shocks for you."
+
+"But I do understand--Lilly."
+
+Long after her child slept that night Lilly sat beside her. She loved
+the willful way the curls flung across the pillow. She leaned to the
+full deep-chested breathing; leaned to kiss the lips which, slightly
+parted, were perfect with the pollen of vitality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+She drew the screen finally about the little davenport, fussing at the
+room, straightening it into a sort of formality with a woman's intuition
+for this chair one-half inch closer to the hearth and that picture ever
+so slightly straighter. The sheer frock she hung up in a closet,
+covering it with a shroud of tissue paper, wadding her daughter's
+none-too-carefully flung stockings into her shoes and tiptoeing to place
+them beside the davenport. They were strong, ribbed stockings, still
+warm and full of curves. She stroked over each. Once she paused at the
+mantelpiece mirror, drawing back her lip from the even whiteness of her
+teeth, perusing her points rather absent-mindedly.
+
+Time had handled Lilly with a caress. At past thirty she was herself at
+twenty, with even more youth, because at twenty she had looked herself
+almost ten years hence. She had rounded out a bit, but not fatly. If
+stouter at all, it was only in the slightly deeper look to the
+cream-colored skin. There were two lines across her forehead, but they
+had been there at eighteen and were quite obviously the result of
+tilting her eyebrows so that the flesh folded; and besides, they
+relieved her clearness, these horizontal traceries, of utter limpidity.
+
+She had drifted, not all unconsciously, into a certain picturesque
+uniformity of dress and could smile now over the large, cart-wheel hats,
+coarse embroideries, and short-vamp shoes; neither was she often above
+mentally contrasting herself in her annual seventy-five dollar suit of
+dark-blue serge, natty sailor hat, and impeccable blouse, with a certain
+coffee-colored linen with its slashings of coffee-dipped embroidery, and
+the blouse that twirled with yards and yards of cotton Valenciennes.
+
+There was still something of the look of the nun to Lilly, but a bit too
+pinkly, as if she had dressed the part for Act One, but wore the ballet
+skirts for Act Two underneath.
+
+Her reaction asserted itself in her child. At thirteen Zoe wore straight
+frocks of navy-blue alpaca with wide patent-leather belts and deep Eton
+collars. They were mistaken sometimes, and, strangely enough, to Lilly's
+invariable chagrin, for sisters, and Lilly, in her refutation, could be
+smitingly swift.
+
+At nine o'clock, to the staccato of three rings, she admitted Bruce
+Visigoth, leading him down the tube of hallway. It annoyed her
+unspeakably that Harry Calvert, collarless, poked out his head from a
+doorway as they passed, and she was suddenly conscious of the smell of
+stew. She had meant to burn an incense stick.
+
+But she walked with that free, Hellenic stride of hers, without apology
+and ahead of him.
+
+"This is our room. Zoe is asleep there behind that screen. Won't you sit
+down?"
+
+He placed his hat and a light bamboo stick across the center table,
+obviously oppressed with a sense of close quarters.
+
+"Tell you what! Suppose we taxi over to Claremont. It's mild enough to
+sit out on the terrace."
+
+She met him with her levelest gaze.
+
+"Aren't you going to be comfortable here?"
+
+"Of course I am. There you go, getting sensitive right off. Only it is
+a warmish evening, and why keep the sun-child awake?"
+
+"Zoe can sleep," she said, with the barely perceptible arch to her
+brows, "even through the fire of your presence."
+
+"Good!" he said, seating himself in great good nature and trying not to
+be quizzical. "So this is where you live."
+
+He was frankly curious, his gaze humorous, but traveling over details,
+his head upflung and the scenting movement to his nostrils. He had not
+changed in weight, but in compactness and as if the house of his being
+had settled with a fine kind of firmness. He was a bit squarer of jaw
+and shoulder and ever so prematurely, and to the enormous fancy of
+women, inclined to a hoar frost of gray at the temples.
+
+She seated herself across the little square of table.
+
+"You don't seem to care for us here."
+
+"Certainly I do, only--only--"
+
+"Only what?"
+
+"Only--well, hanged if I make you out, lady. This place--it just isn't
+you--that's all."
+
+"Nonsense! I don't count. I'm just a sort of a means to an end, anyway."
+
+"What end?"
+
+"The wine!"
+
+"The what?"
+
+"Oh, nothing," she said, and laughed.
+
+"Laugh again."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I like it."
+
+She looked her most serio-comic disapproval and held up a forefinger
+with a warning little waggle to it.
+
+"Please," she said, with an inlay of something deeper in her voice,
+"don't begin by spoiling things."
+
+"Rather not," he said. "I'm going to live up to your letter of the law."
+
+Except for the frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street
+offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and
+shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that
+stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus
+tete-a-tete. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union
+Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a
+Saturday, the day of Zoe's invariable luncheon downtown and subsequent
+opera matinee, he had strolled by what seemed mischievous chance into
+the tea room where they were dining, but the occasion had hardly been a
+success. There had been a great deal of badinage between him and Zoe,
+but Lilly had finished her meal almost in silence. The day following, a
+toy piano of complete range and really excellent workmanship had
+arrived. She returned it without showing it to Zoe. These incidents lay
+between them now.
+
+"So this is where you live," he repeated, as if his long curiosity could
+not find satiety in fact.
+
+"That I have an abode seems to amaze you."
+
+"It does. You're such a detached sort. You rise so above the mundane
+things that clutter up life, that it is pretty much of a shock to
+realize that you use tooth powder and carry a latchkey. It's hard to
+reconcile Chopin and George Sand probably to those famous raw-meat
+sandwiches they loved to eat at midnight. Well, that's about the way I
+feel about you--hemmed in by--dull reality such as this."
+
+"I like raw-meat sandwiches," she said.
+
+"Me too."
+
+They laughed.
+
+She took up a sheaf of manuscript.
+
+"If it doesn't bore you too much, I'm going to read it straight
+through."
+
+"Oh, I forgot; the play, of course."
+
+She looked up at him as if over spectacles.
+
+"What else?"
+
+"You say it has been the rounds?"
+
+"Yes. Peddled in every office in New York. Kline and Alshuler kept it
+two years. Forensi paid her two hundred and fifty dollars advance on it
+and then let his option lapse. For another year there was some talk of
+Comstock and Comstock doing it, and then finally Hy Wolff got hold of it
+and the very month he died paid her a second two hundred and fifty to
+renew his option on it. I've always felt that if Ida had kept after Hy
+Wolff he would have produced it. He had faith in it, but somehow just
+didn't seem to get to it. You see, Ida hasn't any gumption--not the kind
+of aggressiveness the game demands. That is why in fifteen years you
+scarcely know she is in your office. That is why I plunged in and tried
+to rewrite 'The Web' with her. It's a big story, sweated out of her own
+agony. She may never write another. Probably won't. My little part in it
+has merely been to help her co-ordinate--round up the jumble of her
+ideas, so to speak. There is a big play somewhere in this story. I know
+you didn't like it as a sketch--I didn't, either. A short play cannot
+contain this drama. But out of a clear sky it occurred to me that you
+might see it as a three-act play. Oh, I know it isn't the kind of thing
+you've your mind's eye on, but why not take that step over into the
+legitimate _via_ a big popular success? It may pave the way to bigger,
+finer things. Who knows--Ida Blair--'The Web'--may mean the beginning of
+your dream come true."
+
+His mouth had straightened and thinned.
+
+"You're right there. Ultimately I'll get into the other. If my brother
+knew as much about the booking end as he does the realty, I'd have gone
+over long ago. That is the most the success of the Amusement Enterprise
+can mean to me--to afford some day the legitimate as a plaything. It
+costs money to educate the public to better things. It's been profitable
+playing down to its taste--some day it is going to enable me to afford
+to be sufficiently altruistic to foot the bills for serving up the best.
+It costs to educate.",
+
+"Fine! And it is only a question of time until you are ready for that
+inspiring fray. Meanwhile, why not help foot those bills with a little
+side flier in 'The Web'?"
+
+"You are a little opportunist, aren't you?".
+
+"I know 'The Web' isn't art. But it is a cross section of reality with
+the veins exposed and the sap of life running through them. Mrs. Blair,
+poor dear, can't write. God knows I can't. That is why the play has been
+through years of lying around in every office in New York. But the idea
+is there. You see, it is everything she has lived through. You know
+her story?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There is a scene when he comes screaming out of the room after having
+been through the third degree, half blind from the terrible lights and
+the terrible circle of terrible eyes, that isn't writing at all. It's
+life--a raw, palpitating picture of a social abuse that can touch the
+public as a reform measure can never hope to. Then the character of the
+boy--a delinquent. We've one right here in this apartment. One of those
+sweet, shy, half-frightened boys as gentle as a girl. The kind that
+tells the neighborhood children Peter Pan and reads his grandmother to
+sleep. I would trust him anywhere with Zoe, and yet there's the streak!
+The criminal, congenital streak through him that is as pathological as
+measles. Only we handle it under the heading of criminology. It's like
+taking an earache to the chiropodist. The boy is a thief. It's through
+him like a rotten spot, but instead of curing him the law wants to
+punish him. It's like spanking a child for having the measles. But to
+get back--Mrs. Blair has him in this play--just as if she had lifted him
+out of this apartment. She wrote him from the life, too. A young fellow
+who used to be on her husband's beat. It may not be fine writing, but
+'The Web' has the throb of reality through it, and it is my opinion that
+one pulsebeat of life is worth all your chastity of form."
+
+"Right."
+
+"We're one on that? Good! Well, here is your opportunity to solder the
+first link into the legitimate. Keep it in mind while I am reading Ida
+Blair's play and remember I am not talking Ida Blair or Lilly Penny to
+you. I'm talking this play just as I would talk an act to you. Because I
+believe in it."
+
+He seemed to look at her through her words, a smile out in his eyes.
+
+"You're not listening."
+
+"I am," he said, "but your hair looks like it is painted on, the way it
+comes down to that smooth little peak in front. Jove! it's pretty."
+
+She looked off, wanting not to color.
+
+"Come," he said, "I apologize. Read. I'm as predisposed as I can be
+toward anything conceived by that little dormouse of a person in
+the office."
+
+"That's the trouble. You men are too often satisfied with a surface
+inventory. The vault of heart sometimes yields up rare treasures."
+
+"How like you to say that."
+
+"Ready?"
+
+"Go!"
+
+And so, with her head bent so that the light burnished its smoothness,
+she read him "The Web" through two uninterrupted hours, her voice
+throbbing into the quiet. In the third act, when a half-crazed victim of
+the third degree is led out in shuddering and horrible invocation, she
+sprang to her feet for an instant, her gesture decrying its fullest arc.
+
+She was like Iphigenia praying for death, he thought.
+
+Later, when the shades of the prison house begin to dawn upon the
+stunned consciousness of the woman, there were tears in her voice and on
+her lashes, and one fell to the back of her hand, which she wiped off
+against her skirt, like a child.
+
+At eleven o'clock she finished, regarding him brilliantly through her
+flush.
+
+He had wanted to smoke, but thrust the case back into his pocket,
+sitting tilted, his hands locked at the back of his head and gazing at
+the line of the picture molding. Her lips parted as the paused held.
+
+"Well?"
+
+He uncrossed his knees, straightening.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Strong."
+
+"Then it did grip you?"
+
+"Yes, but I can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the
+average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about
+that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be
+entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the
+little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an
+out-and-out--what shall I say?--an out-and-out crook play, to coin
+a phrase."
+
+"Exactly. It is a section of life about which your average playgoer
+knows little or nothing and yet one for which he nourishes a tremendous
+curiosity."
+
+"It's crude--"
+
+"I know, but the idea is bigger than the writing is crude. If I had the
+money I would take a chance on producing it to-morrow. It has social and
+sociological value, and at the same time is corking-good entertainment.
+I read the police-inspector scene to my little girl just to see what she
+would get out of it. 'Why,' she cried, 'a man would confess to anything
+with that white light on him and those big policemen's eyes on him.
+That's not fair! That shouldn't be allowed. Isn't there a way to stop
+it?' That from a thirteen-year-old! It's one of those man-made abuses
+that if we women ever get the vote we'll go after! Don't answer me on
+this play now, Mr. Visigoth. Take it to your hotel. Read it over again.
+Talk it over with your brother when he comes next week. How's that? No
+snap judgment."
+
+"Good. The play is on the docket for the evening. Now let us get the
+taste of the underworld out of our mouths. How would the Claremont
+appeal now?"
+
+"I'd rather not."
+
+"Well, I suppose that amounts to my _conge?_"
+
+She smiled with her brows arched.
+
+"It is after eleven."
+
+He was incessantly feeling for his cigarette case and then with a
+certain unease refraining.
+
+"You may," she said, "one, before you go."
+
+He held the case to her. She took one gingerly, accepting the light more
+gingerly.
+
+"I don't like them," she said, exhaling with the violence of the
+unaccustomed.
+
+"Then whyfore?"
+
+"Because it is a stupid convention which says that a man may and a woman
+may not. Why should it be a matter of course for you and, in most cases,
+a matter of comment and even vulgarity for me?"
+
+"Usage."
+
+"Usage isn't a reason. It's Time's trick for applying the brake to
+progress."
+
+He lit up gratefully, waving out the match and hesitating for a spot to
+dispose of it. She reached across the table, palm up. "Give me."
+
+He caught her hand.
+
+"Lilly!"
+
+She jerked back with a little clicky catch of breath.
+
+"Don't."
+
+"Lilly, you're maddening! Lilly, can't you see what I haven't the words
+to tell you? For years--since that night at the Waldorf--I--I have been
+living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play.
+Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?"
+
+She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing.
+
+"You don't know what you are saying!"
+
+"I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable
+woman in the world--and for me."
+
+She held out his hat and cane.
+
+"My little girl is asleep. Hadn't you better go?"
+
+"That's not fair," he said, taking the hat and cane, but flushing up
+furiously.
+
+"I know it isn't. But what is there I can say to you?"
+
+"You can talk it out. Man to man."
+
+"Sit down," she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through
+swimming and revealing eyes.
+
+"Now--what is there to say--Bruce--between you and me?"
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"You know."
+
+"Are matters unchanged?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I love you, Lilly."
+
+"And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the
+triangle a rectangle."
+
+"You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good God!
+women don't martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you
+doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out
+husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!"
+
+"It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!"
+
+"Mock heroics."
+
+"No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his
+respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are
+some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations.
+Albert Penny and divorce are irreconcilable. Tear his heart out if you
+will, but hands off his respectability. It may sound absurd in the face
+of the enormity of what I have done to him, but it is a great solace to
+me to be able to sacrifice that much to him and to drag him through my
+life like a ball and chain. Somehow it seems that I ought to
+suffer that."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense! You made your mistake and you had the courage to
+tear away from it by the roots. Unless those roots have a drag?"
+
+"No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half
+madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity
+that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This
+mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her?
+Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will?
+Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe's father doesn't
+know that he is a father?"
+
+"Good God!"
+
+"Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better."
+
+"You mean to say you have fought this out alone?"
+
+"He doesn't know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf
+her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She's a
+beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is
+her garden in which to bloom and expand."
+
+"In all these years they don't know your whereabouts?"
+
+"Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and
+happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers.
+I keep them pretty well under glass. It's all so dreamlike--I've always
+been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between
+the dream and reality."
+
+He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close.
+
+"Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness."
+
+"All my life I have done that."
+
+"I cannot put you out of my heart now that I have put you in."
+
+"No. No. No." But his embrace had already shaped itself, and, springing
+back from it and her own singing of the flesh, she crowded up against
+the wistaria-painted screen, shielding it.
+
+"How dared you--here--in this--room! With her!"
+
+"Lilly!"
+
+"Go, please! Go, please!"
+
+"You mean that?"
+
+"You know I do."
+
+He bent low in the attitude of kissing her hand, but without touching
+it.
+
+"Forget everything I've said, Lilly, and forgive. We'll go back to the
+old. Good night, Lilly! Mrs. Penny."
+
+He must have departed on the balls of his feet, because presently
+through the roaring of the silence she heard the door slam without
+having been conscious of his passage down the hallway; and then, after a
+second, Harry Calvert tiptoeing to her open door to look in with his
+light-blue eyes.
+
+She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it.
+
+"Don't," she cried through it--"don't you ever dare do that again,
+Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like
+that--you--you--frighten--me."
+
+Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest
+and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed
+finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat's flank, silently, to
+save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child's.
+
+Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe's hand crept up, finding
+out her mother's cheek.
+
+"Lilly," floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of
+consciousness--"Lilly--you're crying. Are--you sad--again?"
+
+"Yes, Zoe--terribly--terribly--"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The year that Zoe entered High School, 1914, out of an international sky
+of fairly pellucid blue, the thunderclap of world war burst in fury.
+
+It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country
+to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs
+creeping closer and closer to the edge of everyday life, how little the
+complexion of Lilly's routine was changed.
+
+True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze.
+The evening after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, she attended a mass
+meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an
+umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump
+in her throat.
+
+The day the Rainbow Division swept up Fifth Avenue in farewell, she
+could see the rank and file from the roof of the Forty-second Street
+office building, as if the avenue were running a clayey stream, and she
+was torn between the ache and the thanksgiving of having no one to give.
+
+But, for the most part, war kept its talons off Lilly. Twice, and as if
+his exemption from the draft lay heavily, Harry Calvert had tried to
+enlist, his grandmother, with a zeal that was hardly accountable,
+exerting every effort toward that end.
+
+It was almost as if war had revived her somewhat fainting faith in
+Harry's ultimate justification.
+
+But he was underweight and still in a weakened condition from an
+operation for an adenoidal complaint. This last he had undergone before
+the war and at Lilly's urgent instance. She had read, in the mass of
+books on child hygiene, psychology, and physiology she was constantly
+accumulating, the debilitative effects that adenoidal breathing might
+exercise upon an entire constitution and mentality.
+
+Poor Harry, and his cancerous predilection for the kind of thievery that
+almost invariably stacked up to not even petty larceny! He could
+withstand a jewel chest, but not a tool chest. Would steal the robe from
+an automobile, provided it was not a luxurious one. Once, when his
+grandmother at great difficulty had procured for him a clerkship, he
+confiscated the nickel-plated faucets out of the wash room, barely
+escaping prosecution. Only the utter triviality of his thievery and the
+fight in Mrs. Schum saved him from the law. She was as indomitable in
+her protection of him as the granite flesh of rocks.
+
+Quiet, sensitive, with rather a girlish face, slow to beard and quick to
+quiver, Harry was invariably liked during the period he held a position,
+but month to month saw him from a clerkship in a real-estate office to
+window decorator for a retail paper-flower concern, salesman in the
+novelty and stationery department of a bookstore, and once in the
+children's book section of a department store.
+
+He was rarely apprehended, usually abandoning his position, with his
+absurd loot already under cover, and the loss leaking out later, if
+at all.
+
+Invariably, as if by way of confession, he brought home to his
+grandmother the proceeds from these petty sales, effected by who knows
+what device, dropping down into her lap, almost sadly and with a
+shrinkage from what was sure to follow, either the few dollars or the
+bauble of a bit of jewelry.
+
+She would cry up at him and wring her poor hands, and then he would go
+off into his little room adjoining the kitchen, originally intended as
+maid's room, and sit with his head down in his hands, back rounded, and
+all his throat-constricting capacity for meekness out in his attitude.
+
+And, presently, her sobs subsided, Mrs. Schum would creep in after him,
+and behind that closed door there was no telling what long hours of
+pleading and abjuration took place. But, next morning, in her little
+black bonnet, the rust out in her black dress and the "want ad." sheet
+cockily enough beneath her arm, Mrs. Schum would set out with him to
+combat, by the decency of her presence, some of the difficulties of
+seeking a new position with only one or two time-and thumb-worn
+references.
+
+His grandmother's and Lilly's possessions were sacred to him, but every
+morning, after the two roomers had departed, Mrs. Schum would tiptoe
+after, locking their doors and inserting the keys in her
+petticoat pocket.
+
+"I like to keep things locked," she explained to Lilly one day, upon
+being intercepted. "You can never tell when a sneak thief will break
+into these apartment houses that haven't hall service. I've even heard
+of them entering through the fire escape."
+
+"Of course, dear," said Lilly, through heartache for her.
+
+There was an indescribable sweetness in Harry's attitude toward Zoe.
+There had been countless long evenings of her little girlhood when no
+waiting beside her bedside was too tedious--sometimes during three and
+four evenings a week of Lilly's enforced absence in the pursuit of
+vaudeville novelties. He was tireless and faithful as a watchdog,
+keeping awake by whittling at something no more fantastic than a
+clothespin. There were hundreds of them scattered about the house. It
+was the sole form his idleness took. He painted heads and eyes on
+them--cleverly, too--for Zoe, but as she grew older she began to disdain
+them, bullying him in much the fashion her mother had before her.
+
+"I can hop up four steps on one foot," Lilly, with a little catch at her
+heart, chanced to overhear on one occasion.
+
+"No, you can't," said Harry, smilingly and a little teasingly.
+
+Catching at her ankle and flinging her curls, she made an unstaggering
+and easy ascent of not four, but eight.
+
+"There!" she cried, slapping Harry boldly and resoundingly on the cheek.
+"Don't you ever dare say I cannot do what I know I can do."
+
+It left the red print of her little hand, and it was literally as if, as
+he looked away from her, he had turned the other cheek.
+
+Almost immediately she caught his hand, placing her warm face to its
+back.
+
+"Harry, I'm a devil! I'm sorry. You know I don't mean to be a devil.
+Harry! Are you angry? You're not! Please! Be nice, Harry--tell me a
+story--Har-ry."
+
+"Once upon a time--" he began, his light-blue eyes almost with the
+patient look of the blind.
+
+A little later, there occurred an infinitesimal but telling incident
+which served to dissipate whatever growing qualms may have disturbed
+Lilly over the rearing of her child in this atmosphere of petty crime.
+
+One evening, while Harry was performing his willing chore of carrying
+out for his grandmother the little dinner prepared by Mrs. Schum and
+partaken of by Lilly and Zoe at a small card table opened up beside the
+window of their room, Zoe announced, with a certain high-handedness with
+which Lilly was more and more hard pressed to cope:
+
+"I want my dresses longer. That big red-headed boy in the white jacket
+said to me when I went into the drug store over on Columbus Avenue
+to-day for some licorice drops: 'That's right. Wear 'em short; you've
+got the stems.'"
+
+"What a vulgar, horrid remark!"
+
+"Well, I want my dresses longer."
+
+Lilly regarded her daughter with concern troubling up her eyes.
+
+"Don't ever go into that store again, Zoe. I've a mind to stop in there
+myself and talk to the proprietor."
+
+Later that same evening, Harry, with a purpling eye and an opened lip
+which he tried vainly to smuggle past his grandmother, crept into his
+room. But she was too quick for him, and at her high cry of shock Lilly
+rushed into the hallway. There was an utterly alien and vibrating note
+of anger in Harry's voice.
+
+"For God's sake, gramaw, be quiet! It's nothing. Had a row with that
+red-headed clerk down at the drug store. Took the freshness out of him
+for a while."
+
+Lilly tiptoed back to her room. All through a fitful night she woke in
+little starts, kissing into the bare white arm of her child as if she
+could not have done with the assurance of her safe proximity.
+
+It was less than a month later, and over a year after the adenoidal
+operation, that Harry returned home one evening from the real-estate
+office with nine dollars and forty cents in his pocket from the proceeds
+of the nickel-plated wash-room faucets and several liquid-soap
+attachments.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+About eight months after Ida Blair's play had lain gathering mold in the
+lower drawer of Bruce Visigoth's desk, he sent for Lilly.
+
+Their office relationship since the stuffy June evening over the reading
+of the manuscript had been resumed, with invisible joindure. Together
+they continued in biweekly conferences to compile the endless cycle of
+programs that moved like a chain along the cogs of city to city. There
+were nine Enterprise Amusement Theaters now, the newest red-headed pin
+on the circuit map as far west as Tulsa, their booking route as yet
+independent of any of the larger and recent vaudeville mergers.
+
+It was an office boast and pleasantry that Lilly could recite offhand
+through the current program of any of the nine theaters, leaping glibly
+from motion picture, to acrobat, and sister acts.
+
+This was hardly true, but her touch at the steering wheel of her
+department was sensitive and sure. She could substitute for a
+quarantined team of jumping Arabs in Springfield, Illinois, with hardly
+more than a sleight of hand through her card index and a telegram or
+two. She knew that Memphis would not stand for a pickaninny act, and
+that the same was sure fire in Trenton, and was familiar with every
+house manager by long-distance-telephone voice. The department was more
+and more the well-oiled engine under a light steering hand that Lilly
+wielded well and wisely.
+
+Her judgment of the incoming reports of the various house managers, or
+a try-out act, although technically subject to Bruce Visigoth's
+signature, went usually unchallenged. She virtually was her department,
+particularly as the realty aspect of the enterprise came more and more
+to assume the proportions of big business. Within her little office of
+mahogany appointments she worked with an allotment of stenographers and
+clerks. She had an assistant, too; at least, she confiscated him from
+the press department--one Leon Greenberg, a young night student from New
+York University, with an enormous profile rendered positively
+carnivorous of thrust by his struggle up from First Street and Avenue A,
+which is mire with a pull to it.
+
+Her own capacity was unnamed. She was probably still down on the books
+as stenographer, although at fifty dollars a week now, and it was six
+years since she had taken a letter.
+
+It was a gray day in cold and tardy spring when Bruce Visigoth sent for
+her--one of those heavy afternoons that darken up at four o'clock and
+press thick as gravy against the windows. He was seated at his desk,
+hands laced at the back of his head and one foot propped on an open
+drawer, his male stenographer typing at the remote corner of a wide and
+rather luxuriously appointed office. Except for the green cone of light
+over him, the room was plushy with dusk.
+
+"About that play--" he began.
+
+"What play?" she said, seating herself in the entirely easy business
+manner she had with him.
+
+"'The Web.'"
+
+Her strong white hand out from its immaculate linen cuff lay unnervously
+on the glass top of his desk, but the fingers now began to lift
+in rotation.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I talked it over with my brother before he returned to Chicago
+yesterday. Thought the firm might be interested."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"He doesn't see it."
+
+"He--wouldn't."
+
+He bent a sliver of ivory paper knife almost double.
+
+"I should have taken this matter up some time ago, but the sudden death
+of my sister Pauline's husband, Doctor Enlow--"
+
+"Mrs. Blair understands that."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Well," she said, looking off and resolutely keeping her smile, "I guess
+it means 'The Web' must resume its journey again."
+
+"No, it doesn't."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It means that I am going to produce it on my own."
+
+She slid to the edge of the chair, her hand closing over the desk edge.
+
+"Oh! Oh!"
+
+"Isn't that what you want?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, that is my reason."
+
+"You mean you don't see it, either?"
+
+"But you do."
+
+"But--"
+
+"No 'buts.' She goes into rehearsal for a spring try-out in Baltimore,
+Stamford, or any of the dog towns. I'm giving the manuscript to Forbes
+to read this week. He's the man to direct that type of thing. I'm going
+to throw in ten or twenty thousand on your judgment."
+
+"You're serious?" He held out his lean hand. "Ill send for Ida Blair."
+
+"No--please!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Sit down."
+
+She did, biting back excitement.
+
+"I don't know how to talk to that little woman. She depresses me. This
+is your venture and mine."
+
+"But her play! Its production will mean her resurrection. Her monument
+to a memory. Her protest. A chance to get her on her feet. An
+opportunity for a home, a background, a reason for living to a woman who
+has lost every reason. It's her play and her chance."
+
+"And it is our venture."
+
+"I'm not afraid."
+
+"Are we partners, then?"
+
+"If I had the money, yes, to my limit."
+
+"I don't mean that."
+
+"I do."
+
+"All right; go your limit."
+
+"My limit? How far would six one-hundred-dollar municipal bonds and--"
+
+"Good. I'll sell you six per cent of a twenty-thousand-dollar venture
+for the six hundred."
+
+"Six--percent--twenty--thousand--Why, that's not a man-to-man
+proposition! You're treating me like a child."
+
+"All right, then; three per cent for the six hundred."
+
+"Done! But no nonsense. If I lose, I lose. Man to man."
+
+"'Man to man,'" he said, clasping her hand and drinking down deep into
+her gaze.
+
+And so, when she hurried out to the high ledge to which Ida Blair's
+figure had somehow shaped itself as the years went on, she stood for a
+moment to steady the hand she placed on that shoulder.
+
+"Ida!" The older woman raised her eyes of the peculiarly washed quality
+of gray that has faded from repeated scaldings in hot water. "Mr.
+Visigoth wants you in his office, dear--now."
+
+She kept her voice out of quaver, but it had a singing quality like a
+plucked violin string.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In
+her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her
+daughter, toward a subject about which she knew nothing, but, in an
+inchoate way, felt a great deal.
+
+The New York State fight for woman's suffrage had not yet reached its
+victorious culmination, and, reading announcement of a great parade up
+Fifth Avenue for a Saturday afternoon, she took Zoe.
+
+The smell of spring was dancingly out. Shop windows bloomed with the
+millinery of May. Open street cars, open skies, and openwork shirt
+waists had arrived.
+
+They climbed the flank of an omnibus and rode down to the Washington
+Arch in a midair snapping with bunting.
+
+It was on one of those irresistible afternoons--radiant with the
+sun-washed geometry of three architectural renaissances, a
+monastic-fronted fur emporium, a Parthenon of a library, a
+Doric-columned bank--that Lilly and Zoe lumbered their omnibus way
+through the daily carnival of the most rococo avenue in the world.
+
+There was the flare of a sea gull to Zoe--no containing her. Little
+snatches of song bubbled. She was a freshet of delight.
+
+"Look at that tray of violets, Lilly! I must have a bunch."
+
+"Zoe, don't lean over so far!"
+
+"See the yellow satin in that shop window, Lilly! I'd love to wind it
+round me. It's like sun!"
+
+"See those jams of women in white, Zoe, waiting to form into line!"
+
+"I'd love to march!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know, there--there's something sort of onward about it."
+
+"Exactly! Onward! Forward! March!"
+
+With a precocity that never ceased to amuse and delight Lilly, Zoe,
+while only half understanding the content of an occasion, could somehow
+imbibe its essence. She leaned now over the rail of the omnibus, the
+cross-town streets, as they jogged past, already colloid masses of women
+waiting to fall into line.
+
+"Isn't it queer, Lilly, that after all these centuries and centuries
+women are just beginning to--what did that woman on the program call it
+down at Cooper Union hall the other night--function in the government?
+Why has it taken them so long to ask for their half in the say-so
+of things?"
+
+"Any great movement, Zoe, must have very slow beginnings. Think for what
+ages man lived without Christianity!"
+
+"Yes; but look how long it has been here."
+
+"Reckoning in geology, Zoe, and compared with the age of mountains and
+oceans, two thousand years isn't long."
+
+"I think it is."
+
+"You darling!"
+
+They alighted at the Washington Arch, jamming their way into the tight
+battalion of spectators already lining both sides of lower Fifth Avenue.
+The head of the parade was already forming, a slim young leader holding
+in her white mount with difficulty.
+
+"Lilly, she looks like our picture of Jeanne d'Arc when she sees the
+vision!"
+
+"She is heeding a vision, Zoe--of to-morrow."
+
+"I feel so--so thrilled, Lilly. Do you?"
+
+"Yes," said Lilly, for some reason breathing hard. "Oh, I do!"
+
+There was a break of music, and all about them women darting into line,
+sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the
+archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative
+frieze of the arch.
+
+At the Eighth Street curb, where they stood, five hundred women, with
+standards lifted, stiffened suddenly into formation, a deputy from their
+ranks, a buyer, by the way, for the largest cloak-and-suit house in the
+world, calling short, quick orders and distributing American flags.
+
+The air was rent with silk and brass; a simoom of rapture raced over
+Zoe. She danced on the balls of her feet. It was then that a deputy,
+with a face that recalled newspaper reproductions of it, spied her.
+
+"Here, little girl! You! Oh, lovely! Could you manage this banner, dear,
+and lead this section? Miss, is this lovely child your sister? Do let
+her lead!"
+
+"She's my daughter."
+
+"Come; you may fall in line right behind her. Do you mind if I unpin
+your sister's curls? Oh, she's lovely--"
+
+"I said she's my _daughter!_"
+
+"Here, right in front, dear--my--oh, what a find!"
+
+And so, with her somewhat bewildered parent in the ranks behind her, her
+little black frock wrapped in a purple-and-yellow banner, head up, eyes
+stars, Zoe Penny led the largest district of Greater New York up Fifth
+Avenue, a constant and running line of applause following her lead.
+
+She was youth sonnetized. Cameras clicked after her, and, with the
+martial music tickling her blood, her head went higher still, like a
+stag's. To her mother, following after, it seemed that the loudest of
+all must be music within her own heart, and so she marched on, sprayed,
+as it were, by the wave of constant applause as it broke over Zoe and
+died down at the rank and file.
+
+It was dusk when they reached Fifty-ninth Street, and in the jam of
+disbanding and quite a little demonstration over Zoe by the section she
+had distinguished, they worked their way out finally toward the
+cross-town street car, hand in hand, like two ecstatic, rather
+bewildered babes in the wood.
+
+At a touch upon her shoulder Lilly turned, spun, rather, under high
+tension, to encounter the well-bred hesitancy of an exceedingly slender
+woman, a very small head set on the stem of a long, gracile neck,
+something hauntingly familiar in the somewhat heart-shaped face and the
+far-apart eyes that were considerably younger than the white hair which
+framed them.
+
+"I beg your pardon"--in a voice perfectly rounded of edges--"but my
+husband is so enchanted with the little girl that we are taking the
+liberty of asking to meet her. Won't you permit me to present my
+husband, Gedney Daab? You have heard of him, I presume."
+
+Lilly had. The "Dolorosa" above her desk was a print from a Gedney Daab.
+
+He stepped forward then, lanky and rugged, with a great shock of
+upstanding gray hair, with the path of his fingers through it and his
+features with no scheme at all. Just very delightfully irregular, he
+jutted out of any crowd.
+
+"Zoe, Mr. and Mrs. Daab want to meet you."
+
+She lifted her clean gaze, dropped a courtesy, and held out her hand
+with the short, curved gesture of childhood.
+
+"Hello!" he said, the timbre of real youth in his voice, which childhood
+is so quick to detect from the silly enameling of tone coated on by
+grown-ups for the occasion. "I want to paint you, youngster."
+
+"Oh, Lilly, what fun!"
+
+"Then she is your sister?"
+
+"Oh no, Mrs. Daab; she is my daughter."
+
+"But the name--"
+
+"It's our way together."
+
+"How droll!"
+
+"Do you think I'm pretty?"
+
+Gedney Daab looked down at her ardent artlessness without a burst of
+laughter.
+
+"Oh, as little girls go."
+
+"Zoe knows God has merely given her a fair urn of a body, Mr. Daab,
+which she, in turn, must fill with beauty of mind and spirit."
+
+"You are the Dolorosa, aren't you?" continued Zoe, turning to Mrs. Daab.
+"The sad one with the tears that don't show, from crying on the
+inside of you."
+
+It was not until then that this dawned upon Lilly. Those eyes of the
+Dolorosa, bleeding tears, were Mrs. Daab's.
+
+"You'll have to paint me as glad--won't you?--glad all over clear from
+the inside."
+
+"Yes, Sunlight; I rather think I will."
+
+"Will you permit my husband and me to take you home, Mrs.--"
+
+"Penny."
+
+"Oh, please, Lilly!"
+
+"We live rather far up from here--Ninety-first Street, West."
+
+"And we live at Park Hill; so you see we hardly regard that as far."
+
+They were presently riding through the Park, Zoe facing the three of
+them in the soft gray interior of the Daab limousine. She was
+absolutely artless.
+
+"I've been in a taxi three times and a hansom once. But I prefer this. I
+shall have my own some day--only, purple upholstery instead of
+gray--sort of wine color--"
+
+"An early eye to effect, I see, young miss."
+
+"I'm the class beauty," she explained. "I didn't care to be that at
+first--Lilly says it is just a lovely accident and might happen to
+anyone else. She wanted me to be class president; so I decided to
+be both."
+
+"You will observe that my daughter is not chiefly notable for her
+reticence."
+
+"You come to my studio, little lady, and I am going to paint you just as
+golden and radiantly innocent as you are."
+
+"What is 'radiantly innocent'?"
+
+"Good Lord! I don't know any definition of it except--you."
+
+"Zoe has no innocence in one sense, Mr. Daab. Her real innocence lies in
+the fact that life has no ugly secrets from her. She knows the beautiful
+from the ugly, and why it is so. I think that is what Mr. Daab means by
+'radiant innocence,' Zoe.' Fearless knowledge of truth."
+
+He whistled softly in the gloom.
+
+"Extraordinary!" said Mrs. Daab. "And you are one of us--aren't you,
+dear?"
+
+"For suffrage? Oh yes; and I am going to be a real one when I grow up."
+
+"What else are you going to be?"
+
+"A singer."
+
+"You said that as if you meant it."
+
+"I do. I've already heard nine operas. I am allowed to be anything I
+want so long as I get to the biggest--the very biggest!"
+
+"Are you studying?"
+
+"I've had piano lessons for five years."
+
+"I'm looking about now for a vocal teacher for her. She may be too
+young, but at least I want her voice tried. I--we think she has quite an
+amazing range."
+
+"Have you tried Trieste?"
+
+"Oh, I haven't dared contemplate anyone so inaccessible as he."
+
+Mrs. Daab turned her head.
+
+"Gedney," she said, "couldn't you give her a note to Trieste?"
+
+"Good!" he said, feeling for a card and scrawling across its face. "This
+will pass you directly to his nibs."
+
+"You couldn't have granted us a bigger favor," said Lilly, feeling her
+face glow.
+
+"Then you grant me one. Bring your little girl to my Fifty-ninth Street
+studio. I want to paint her."
+
+"Indeed I will!"
+
+"When?"
+
+"Saturday afternoon is our only time."
+
+"Fine. To-day two weeks?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+They Were at Ninety-first Street now, and he saw them up to their door.
+
+"Good-by," he said. "You're a great youngster, and you've picked a great
+little mother for yourself. Mrs. Daab and I want you both at the
+studio often."
+
+Up in their room, they embraced, Zoe's arms tight about her mother's
+neck.
+
+"It's begun, Lilly, to be wonderful!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Life!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Saturday afternoon following, in a brownstone house in West
+Forty-sixth Street that was more like a museum of the storied loot of
+many lands, Trieste himself opened the pair of Florentine doors,
+originally unhinged from a campanile outside of Rome, of his very
+private studio, without appointment, to the magic of Gedney Daab's
+scrawled card.
+
+He had a head, Lilly decided, like the one of Praxiteles in the St.
+Louis Museum of Fine Arts--only, the bust implied young hair, and
+Trieste's curls were full of gray and the lines of his face were slashed
+deeply. He listened, while Lilly talked her brief preamble, as he
+invariably did, with his eyes closed and finger tips touching. Finally,
+he opened them, regarding Lilly from under swollen, rather
+diabetic lids.
+
+"You should sing," he said, his acquired language grating slightly
+against the native one.
+
+"No! No!"
+
+"You are young," he said, running his eyes down her body, "and fine and
+big and strong."
+
+She rose as if to throw off the crowding stress of the moment.
+
+"Once," she said; "but that is all over now. My little girl--"
+
+"You have temperament--let me hear," he said, reaching out to the piano
+and striking out a bold C. "Sing the scale."
+
+"Please!" she cried, the situation an agony to her. "Not me. My
+little--"
+
+"Why, Lilly!" said Zoe, regarding her mother with wide, unaffected eyes.
+"Sing the scale, dear."
+
+"Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do"--through a crimson flush.
+
+He seemed to lose interest then, turning to Zoe.
+
+"Let me hear you," he said.
+
+"Shall I sing 'Jocelyn' or 'How Like a Bird'?"
+
+"Anything--something simpler."
+
+"Schubert, then, Zoe."
+
+In her straight frock, with its wide patent-leather belt and flat white
+collar, the cascade of her hair down over it, Zoe held the center of the
+vast studio, singing straight into her mother's eyes.
+
+It seemed to Lilly, at the sound of that voice, not yet cleared of
+childish treble, but as ready to rise as a lark, that every ounce of her
+blood must be gushing against her throat; so, after it was finished, she
+sat on quite dumbly, staring at the manner in which Trieste remained
+sitting with his eyes closed.
+
+"Lyric soprano," he said, finally. "Fine! Big! God-given!"
+
+"_Maestro_--you mean that?"
+
+"Heigh-ho!" he said on a sigh, walking over and placing his hand on
+Zoe's curls. "I make up my mind I am seeck of this business. I wait only
+for this war to live my day quietly in Capri, where I have my _casa_,
+and now a new nightingale flies in at my window. Twice now. Ten years
+ago comes Carrienta out of just such a clear sky, and once more, when I
+am again sure that one voice is only more unmusical than the rest,
+comes this--"
+
+Standing there, Lilly was fighting an impulse to faint. She remembered,
+with terror, previous sensations, and fought off the vertigo, biting
+down into her lips. She wanted to smile, but her mouth felt numb, as if
+it dragged instead of lifted.
+
+"You--you make us very happy--_maestro_."
+
+"Some day," cried Zoe, still thrilling from her effort, "I will sing
+until my high C hits the sky!"
+
+'I think you will, _bella mia_, if you have in you the power to work for
+it."
+
+"I have."
+
+"Art is the most cruel paymaster in the world. It exacts full
+recompense, toil, and heartache before it deals out a first payment
+in success."
+
+"I'll pay! I'll pay for what I want, and most of all I want to sing!"
+
+She trilled up a brace of scales for him then, and there were minute
+questions of health and habits, and, finally, in a waiting pause, Lilly
+found word to ask the question against which her lips stiffened.
+
+"What--are--your terms--_maestro_?"
+
+Something strange happened then, his well-known acumen immediately
+asserting itself. It was as if he had slipped into another personality.
+
+"Fifteen dollars a lesson. She must have three a week and her school
+work and other studies should be reduced."
+
+"Lilly--we're too poor for that!"
+
+"I--I'm afraid my little girl is right, _maestro_. I--I couldn't even
+pay that for all three. I'm employed myself, you see."
+
+"Oh," he said, and walked off to the window, dilly-dallying on his
+heels and looking out.
+
+Finally he turned, with a gesture of dismissal.
+
+"I have never before, except Carrienta, done such a thing. It must be a
+secret between us. My belief is that art should be as well paid as any
+life work, whether it is dentistry or lawmaking or storekeeping. But
+your child here--they do not come so every day. In ten years, with
+hundreds of pupils each year, she is the greatest since Carrienta. But I
+must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her
+free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go
+out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists.
+Good afternoon. Good-by--Zoe"--placing his hands on her curls as if for
+their warmth.
+
+In the room adjoining, under whisper of a very soft pedal, some one,
+probably a waiting pupil, was playing the indomitable pianoforte
+composition, "Melody in F." Staring at her daughter, an old conceit of
+Lilly's girlhood came flowing back. It seemed to her that a proscenium
+arch of music was forming over Zoe and that her voice, a high-flung
+scarf of melody, was winding itself reverently round a star.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon, Bruce Visigoth again asked Lilly to marry him.
+
+Taking advantage of the quiet of a Saturday afternoon half holiday, she
+had returned to the office to clear her desk of an accumulation of
+loose ends.
+
+In spite of herself, an extraordinary depression, low as storm clouds,
+was gathering over the excitation whipped up by Trieste's acceptance
+of Zoe.
+
+The tight squeeze of a lump was gathering in her throat. Finally she
+laid her cheek to the desk and cried a little pool of her unaccountable
+melancholy on to the glassed surface.
+
+Bruce Visigoth found her so, although, at his entrance, she sprang from
+the mound of her misery, violently simulating affairs at a lower drawer.
+
+"Hello!" he cried, then, eying her crumpled cheek and the lane of tears:
+"Ah, I say now! Come, come; this won't do. What's up?"
+
+She rubbed her bare hand furiously across the ravages of her sharp
+depression.
+
+"Nothing. I--I guess I'm blue," she said, in a half laugh. "Something
+wonderful has happened to Zoe, and I--it's made me so happy, I'm blue.
+That's it--so--happy--I'm blue."
+
+"What is the wonderful thing?"
+
+She told him.
+
+It was then he caught her hands.
+
+"Lilly, marry me! Make it possible! Don't let the years lead you into a
+blind alley. You are bound inevitably to lose a child like Zoe--to life.
+That's why you are so unaccountably blue, Lilly; the writing is on
+the wall."
+
+"No!" she cried, plunging past him, her hat in hand and her throat now a
+cave of the winds for her unreleased sobs. "The years have brought me,
+Zoe. She is my fulfillment. You can't frighten me--life cannot take her
+from me. I'm not afraid--only, I can't bear anything to-night, least of
+all from you--"
+
+"Lilly, you're not--"
+
+"Let me go! I'm all right--only tired--that's all.
+Terribly--terribly--tired."
+
+She was presently on her homeward way, walking swiftly, almost, it would
+seem, a little madly, through a May evening that hung as thinly as one
+thickness of a veil.
+
+At Seventy-second Street she veered suddenly and rather unaccountably
+to Riverside Drive and down into a ledge of park that dips like a
+terrace to the Hudson River.
+
+An asphalt walk led in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered
+couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf
+had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be
+comprehended from the under side.
+
+At one of the lowermost curves of the walk, the width of a brace of
+railroad tracks between, a coal dock jutted out into the river. Across
+these forbidden tracks, indeed, as if they did not exist,
+Lilly wandered.
+
+At the last inch of dock, so that the water licked up at her shoes,
+Lilly stood poised. Not, it is true, with the diver's blade thrust of
+arms, but rather the unskilled, the indeterminate movement of one
+vaguely prompted from the unfathomable places of the heart.
+
+It was upon that move that something, a terrifying restraint, laid hold
+of Lilly's jangling nerve ends.
+
+"Hey there! None o' that to-night!"
+
+A dockman's hand, hairy as an Airedale, had her by the arm, and
+somewhere at her brow, cooling it, the fine hand of Bruce Visigoth,
+pressing her against him, and at that touch Lilly's hysteria shot up
+like a geyser.
+
+"Don't!" she screamed, and would have struggled for the edge except for
+the two firm hands now pressing her arms to her sides.
+
+"Lilly, for God's sake, get hold of yourself!"
+
+"Let me go! Let me go!"
+
+"Aw no; we don't leggo. It's a good stroke we both happened to spy you
+at the same minute. There's nothin' gives strength like a spell of the
+craziness. You'd 'a' jumped me alone, sure!"
+
+"No! No! It wasn't that--God, not that! Tell me, Bruce, it
+wasn't--that."
+
+"Of course it wasn't, Lilly."
+
+"That's what they all say once they git their senses jerked back. Come
+in here and pull yourself together, girl, or I'll call an ambulance or a
+patrol, suiting your pleasure."
+
+"Let me go, you! I won't stand it. I must have been mad! Bruce, you tell
+him, please--it wasn't--that!"
+
+"You're wrong, old man. Here--take this for your trouble, but this young
+woman is my sister. We walked out here together."
+
+Quieted suddenly to the merest timbre of insolence, the old man shambled
+off.
+
+"Sure!" he said, far too knowingly. "Sure!" And faded shaggily,
+impudently into darkness.
+
+Bruce Visigoth took Lilly home in a taxicab. At her door she broke her
+shamed silence.
+
+"You understand, Bruce, it wasn't anything--like that. It must have been
+nerves--tiredness--but nothing, Bruce, that you think it was. That old
+man was wrong. You must understand--for her sake--it wasn't that."
+
+"Of course it wasn't, Lilly." His voice drained off, as if from
+exhaustion.
+
+But for years, like a wound whose jagged lips were slow to close, the
+memory of this night lay palpitating between them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+"The Web" was tried out in Baltimore the following April, Zoe, Ida
+Blair, and Bruce Visigoth traveling down on the same train with the
+company. It cost Lilly a pang for Zoe to miss the two days of school and
+a vocal, a French, and a piano lesson, but the theater attracted Zoe
+like the blithesome little moth she was. The duties of her High School
+combined with the unrelenting tutelage of Treiste molded her young days
+pretty rigidly to form, but more than once, during the rehearsals of
+"The Web," Lilly, seated in the black maw of the auditorium, would turn
+suddenly to the feel of her daughter's gaze burning like sun through
+glass into the darkness. The company adopted her as a pet. The director
+babied her. Once, as the afternoon rehearsal was disbanding, she crept
+up through a box to the stage. The footlights were dark, but she came
+down quite freely toward them, seeming to feel their mock blaze, and
+sang a snatch or two from the tenderest _Lieder_ ever written, bits of
+Schubert and Hugo Wolf, the company gathering in the wings to listen
+and applaud.
+
+The incident, slight as it was, brought the scratch of tears to Lilly's
+eyes and the pull of half hysteria to her lips. What if, after all, an
+incredible fulfillment was gathering about her like a vast dawn? "O
+God! please!"
+
+And so, to the unending delight and amusement of Bruce, Zoe went along
+to Baltimore, Lilly pinching a little over the expense and pressing out
+ribbons and girlish accessories up to the last minute.
+
+With Ida Blair, who had sunk back against years the colorlessness of
+cold dish water, herself more colorless, it was as if she had fired her
+one and only shot and run retreating behind the explosion.
+
+Already her name had been linked with a co-author on programs and
+three-sheets, because a collaborator, a professional mender of plays,
+had been called in at the last moment to riddle the drama's somber story
+with a few "laughs." A character policeman, a comedy jury foreman, and a
+subplot of love story between the character policeman and an Irish cook
+had been "written in." The last act entirely revised, a happy ending
+substituted, and the theme of the story extricated like a jumping nerve.
+
+It was the heroic treatment administered by experts to save what looked
+like unmistakable demise after the first Baltimore performance, and all
+the while Ida Blair sat mutely by, trying to probe through the actuality
+of her play or what was left of it, actually in the acting.
+
+"The Steel Trap," as it was renamed, played to indifferent reviews and
+receipts the remainder of the Baltimore engagement, and lost money in
+Washington, but to the director, Bruce Visigoth, and certainly to Lilly,
+looked a potential property.
+
+So after two weeks the play was removed, revamped, recast, still another
+play diagnostician called in, and under his surgery the third and fourth
+acts combined, and the original role of love story made to predominate
+what sociological note the play still contained. After an October tryout
+in Stamford and a New York opening of still doubtful reception, when the
+production hung between life and death and all the well-known
+exigencies of oxygen were applied in the form of "papering" the house
+with two weeks of free tickets, press-agenting, _et al._, the public
+decided to like it.
+
+"Who Did It?" as it was re-renamed, settled down to a run of forty-three
+New York weeks, and along the Rialto the source of its authorship leaked
+out and became curbstone, and finally newspaper, patter.
+
+At the end of six months Ida Blair had resigned her bookkeepership,
+erected a small but perfect plinth of blue granite in a certain hillside
+cemetery, purchased a story-and-a-half bungalow in the heart of two Long
+Island acres, and was raising leghorns and educating a niece
+by marriage.
+
+For the forty-three metropolitan weeks, not to mention stock, foreign,
+motion pictures, and road incomes that were to accrue later, Lilly was
+receiving her share, never less than one hundred and twenty-five dollars
+a week and often considerably more.
+
+It was a windfall pure and simple. The years of petty pickering suddenly
+seemed more horrid to her in retrospect than she had ever realized they
+were in the living. It was hateful to have reckoned in car fares and to
+so often have appeared to do the niggardly thing before the unspoken
+reproach of her child.
+
+That same winter a cashier's note with her weekly check announced a
+thirty-three and a third per cent advance in salary. Life had suddenly
+quickened its tempo. She was passing through one of those eras when
+events, long crouched, seem to spring simultaneously.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In April, 1917, the United States declared war against Germany. Daily
+life, even to the indirectly touched, took on a new throb. Fourteen men
+employees of the Amusement Enterprise Company enlisted the first week.
+A service flag went up. Bruce Visigoth, outside the draft limit,
+immediately enrolled on a service committee, spending two days out of
+every week in Washington. Vaudeville ranks sagged suddenly and for a
+brief moment the gray-haired actor came back into his own. Office
+tension tightened. A nervousness set in. A telephone ringing could set
+Lilly's nerves to quivering and the telephone not ringing fill her with
+a nameless sort of anxiety.
+
+More and more, too, it seemed to her, with the emotions always just a
+scratch beneath the surface those war times, that the agony of pretense
+between her and Bruce Visigoth could not endure. That he had applied for
+a commission in active service Lilly knew, but merely from
+correspondence. There had been no talk about it. She awoke nights, heavy
+with a dread she could not name.
+
+Only the violent conjuring of her child and a vision of Albert Penny
+carried her rebellion past these bad places. Their frequent enforced
+conferences; the chance touching of their fingers, only to fly too
+instantly apart; the impeccable masks of indifference and elaborate
+casualness of manner; the forbidden singing through her entire being as
+he walked into the office and the imperturbability of the manner she
+must present to him. To contemplate a future futile with such dreary
+repetition became almost more than she could bear, and bitter with that
+salt were the lonely tears she cried at night.
+
+Even the occasional appearance of Robert Visigoth came more and more to
+be a sort of biting irritant to a gangrenous spot she thought long since
+had hardened.
+
+He had grown enormously fat and Rufus G. Higginbothom, dying, had
+enhanced that glutted look by bequeathing to his only daughter, Hindle,
+without stipulation, a leaf-lard fortune of some seventeen
+million dollars.
+
+When his daughter, Pauline, was thirteen, he brought her to New York on
+one of his frequent fliers, parading the fat, freckled, and frightened
+youngster from one department to another.
+
+"How much do you think she weighs?" he was fond of interrogating, with
+his small parental eyes full of pride. "Hundred and thirty-six for
+thirteen years. Not bad, eh?"
+
+With about the sickest sensation she was ever to know, Lilly saw him
+this day lead his daughter past her open door, his face averted and the
+roll of fat at the back of his neck redly conscious.
+
+It was after this incident that a half plan, long dormant, lifted its
+head. Every day in her comings and goings through the wide fireproof
+corridors of the Forty-second Street building a sign on a ground-glass
+door waved at her like a flag:
+
+     MISS NELLIE TERRY
+
+     Playbroker
+
+     Authors'
+     Manuscripts
+     Placed
+
+She had little doubt of her ability to launch out into a scheme of this
+sort for herself and liked to incubate the idea in the back of her head,
+going so far as to inspect a tiny office on the fifteenth floor,
+mentally furnishing it up, and visualizing her name in neat black
+letters on her own ground-glass door.
+
+She did broach the subject to Zoe one evening, who, with her head
+wrapped in a brilliant fez improvised out of an old cushion top, stood
+before the mirror, attitudinizing her part in school entertainment.
+
+"No! Don't go into anything tin horn like that! I hate for you to keep
+playing _second fiddle._"
+
+In the pause that followed, hardly perceptible enough to hold the drop
+of a pin, Zoe flashed toward her mother, the colossal ego of her youth
+somehow penetrated for the moment.
+
+"Why, Lilly--I--I mean--You know what I mean--"
+
+"Of course I know what you mean, dear. Second fiddle!"
+
+And so what with Zoe's growing demands and Lilly's rooted fear of any
+jeopardy to them, time marched on rather imperceptibly, except that
+Lilly thinned and whitened a bit, slendering down, as it were, to more
+and more sisterly proportions as her daughter shot up to meet her. They
+were shoulder to shoulder now, if the truth were known, Zoe a little in
+the preponderance.
+
+Meanwhile, Zoe was growing restive of the somewhat irksome limitations
+of the Ninety-first Street apartment. She complained that the room was
+oppressive for her long hours of study and practice. Visits to the Daab
+studio, faithful in effect to a Doge's palace and where she was more and
+more a favorite, and also to the pretentious homes of one or two school
+companions, had an upsetting effect upon her. The long, gloomy neck of
+hallway depressed her and she voiced bitterly a secret aversion of
+Lilly's for the single bathroom with the ugly wooden floor and shallow
+bathtub. "Dump" she called the little flat, her brilliant blue gaze
+blackening up.
+
+"I can't have the girls and boys visit me in this little two-by-four,
+dear. It's a dump!"
+
+And so early in the run of "Who Did It?" the little group moved again.
+This time to a strictly modern, pretentious apartment in West End
+Avenue, whose upper apartments boasted a river view and three baths and
+rented as high as four and five thousand dollars a year.
+
+For twelve hundred Lilly obtained the ground-floor rear, no view, but
+five fairly large rooms and two capacious baths. And since such a house
+takes its tone from its highest-priced tenants, they enjoyed with them
+the uniformed hall service, the ornate entrance _de luxe_ and foyer
+_de trop_.
+
+In lieu of maid, Harry again occupied those quarters, his grandmother
+sleeping on a davenport in the sitting-dining-room. There were no
+roomers, Lilly carrying the resultant deficit.
+
+She and Zoe again shared what corresponded to the parlor, this time a
+fairly large room, with alcove curtained off for sleeping quarters. They
+furnished it themselves, quite charmingly, too, and with a consensus of
+taste except where Lilly gave way to Zoe's really superior intuition.
+
+There were plain ecru walls, not papered, but, at Zoe's instance,
+painted and roughened up with a process called "stippling." The two-tone
+brown rug. An overstuffed couch of generous proportions and upholstered
+in a nicely woven imitation of Flemish tapestry. Along the back of this
+piece, which occupied virtually the center of the room, was a long,
+narrow table the exact length of the couch, with a pair of Italian
+polychrome candlesticks, gift of Gedney Daab, at either end.
+
+A piece of old red brocade hung over the fireplace, covering the ugly
+mirror, and facing it a brown-rep fireside chair, coarse tan fishnet
+curtains, a pair of huge black-velvet floor cushions with orange-colored
+balls in each center, bespeaking a new art era which was dawning as
+colorfully and as formlessly as a pricked egg yolk.
+
+An upright piano was stacked with music, and, in spite of Lilly's
+argument for them, no pictures on the walls, only a brilliant panel
+portrait of Zoe, signed Gedney Daab, her young form in faint profile
+against a background of cloth of gold, the face up-flung to a flow of
+sunlight that crossed the picture in a churchy ray.
+
+"If we cannot have originals or etchings, we won't have any. I hate
+middle-classness."
+
+"But, Zoe, dear--a few good prints. 'The Age of Innocence'--"
+
+She kissed her mother on the mouth with all the outrageous patronage of
+youth.
+
+"You're a darling, Lilly, but they just aren't doing it that way any
+more, dear."
+
+So there were no pictures.
+
+At the time of this move, Harry had been holding the position of clerk
+at the cigar, magazine, and book concession of one of the newest and
+noisiest of Broadway's terrific commercial hotels.
+
+The hours were difficult, from noon to midnight, but within the
+seventeen months he had advanced from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a
+week. A new, a surprising spruceness had laid hold of him. He took to
+exceedingly tall small collars and vivid neckwear, his suit very narrow
+and making him look less than ever his years.
+
+Mrs. Schum, too, had taken on some of that well-being, and, though she
+complained constantly of a sciatic twist in her side, something had
+lifted from off her. Her patter about the house, in the slippers with
+the rubber insets, was lighter; she discarded the old jet-edged dolman
+with the humps on the shoulders and the slits for the arms, for a decent
+full-length black coat with a stitched braid border and self-covered
+buttons, gift of her grandson. There had been a present for Lilly, too,
+a light-blue, drugstore-purchased celluloid toilet set.
+
+He no longer sat idle in his room, his light eyes futile with staring at
+space or his head down tiredly in his hands. Something had indeed come
+over Harry.
+
+"After all," said Lilly, always readily buoyed, "the operation did
+accomplish!"
+
+Sometimes, since his mornings were free, he rode down to the office with
+Lilly, eagerly insistent to pay her car fare and cram a return Subway
+ticket into the warm pink aperture of flesh where her glove clasped.
+
+Once he bought her a little spray of heather off a vender's tray.
+
+"Harry, you mustn't spend on me this way. You must begin to save your
+money for that right girl when she comes along."
+
+Never quick with retort, he stood watching her dart into the foyer of
+the Forty-second Street building, a sudden silence shaping around him
+that had in it the little noises of birds singing. "Right girl," he kept
+repeating after her, or something like that, and remained there
+loitering for twenty minutes after her presence had fluttered through
+the revolving doors and into the elevator.
+
+And then suddenly a quick succession of events set in.
+
+One night Lilly and Zoe, returning from a Boston Symphony concert for
+which they held first-balcony season seats, found Harry trying to pour
+brandy between the clenched lips of Mrs. Schum, who lay rigid on the
+hall floor where she had fallen, her head bleeding from a sharp contact
+with the door.
+
+Her poor face with the shriveled bags of flesh seemed suddenly shrunk,
+and, holding the flask against her teeth, Harry's hands were trembling
+so that the liquid poured in a thin stream off the edge of her mouth.
+
+After half an hour of desperate and unavailing use of home remedies,
+Lilly sent for a doctor, one in the building, who came down in
+dinner clothes.
+
+At twelve o'clock that night Mrs. Schum, without regaining
+consciousness, was rushed to the Saint Genevieve Hospital in East
+Seventy-eighth Street, for an emergency operation that had to do with a
+growth in her side.
+
+It was Lilly's first contact with the casualty of sudden illness. In the
+little anteroom of the hospital, her hand in Harry's, she sat the
+remainder of the night through. He was constantly wiping away the tears
+from his light eyes and looking away to gulp. She reassured him where
+she could, tightening her hold of his hand.
+
+"Don't--let them hurt her."
+
+"They aren't hurting her, Harry dear. She can't feel at all under the
+anaesthetic."
+
+"But they won't know. Gramaw won't let them know. Tell them, Lilly,
+she's that way--not to hurt her--please."
+
+"Harry--dear!"
+
+At dawn milk wagons began to clatter through streets no grayer than
+Harry's face. But at six o'clock Mrs. Schum was reported "as well as
+could be expected" and the operation apparently a success.
+
+They rode home through the early morning, Lilly insisting upon a taxicab
+and Harry lying back, quite frankly spent, against her arm. Her vitality
+was unquenchable, mounted, in fact, under stress. Untired, she brewed
+him hot coffee, forced him to drink it and lie down; tidied up the
+little flat there at six-thirty o'clock in the morning, with a
+hit-and-a-miss it is true, but allaying all signs of confusion; fluted
+an Eton collar for Zoe and packed her off to school; and at half after
+eight, just out of a cold and invigorating shower, was combing out the
+fine electric rush of her hair, a pink Turkish bathrobe, the color of
+her firm, cool skin, wrapped tightly about her and caught in by a cord
+at her waist line.
+
+Suddenly through the mirror she saw the door open, and before she could
+call out, Harry stood in the center of the room, his eyes running quite
+unmistakably over the contour of her sheathed body.
+
+It was the first time he had ever violated the slightest nicety, and,
+outraged even in her pity for him, her hand flew up, drawing the robe
+closer at her breast.
+
+"Don't come in!" she cried, retreating up against the dresser and
+turning her shoulder with the hair flowing over it toward him. "How
+dared you come in here without knocking! Go!"
+
+He was crying, not seeming to know it, because he continued, even as she
+stood blazing at him, to stand staring through the rain of tears.
+
+"Harry, you're forgetting yourself. You mustn't give way. Your
+grandmother is over the worst now--"
+
+Suddenly he was on his knees, his back round and shaken with sobs.
+
+"Lilly--Lilly--can't you see?"
+
+"See what? Is anything wrong? Harry," she cried, stooping to shake him
+by the shoulder, "has anything happened again? Are you in trouble?"
+
+He would not rise, following her, to her horror, by walking on his
+knees, pressing and pressing the hem of her garments, and before she
+realized it burning his kisses down into it. She fought him off, tearing
+from his grasp and staggering back against the wall.
+
+"Harry--you're in trouble again."
+
+He caught her bare arm, pressing his lips into the yielding flesh.
+
+"Lilly, I can't hold back any longer. I love you. I'm all alone. With
+gramaw here I could hold back--somehow--but now--Lilly--Lilly--I
+love you."
+
+She could only stare, her mouth fallen open and the rim of her eyes
+their widest.
+
+"It's been so long to--hold back--so long. Since that first day at the
+street car--you kissed me--and now with gramaw gone--Lilly--"
+
+She jerked him up from his knees this time, holding him firmly, even
+absurdly, by the coat lapels, shaking him.
+
+"Harry, you've gone mad!"
+
+"I love you, Lilly. All these years. I'm all alone now and--"
+
+Her glance shot to the egress of the door, but, seeing that he
+anticipated her, she did not dart, but held herself back from him, her
+hands in an X across her breast.
+
+"Harry," she said, trying to keep out of her voice a rising sense of
+fear, "you're not well You don't know what you are saying or doing."
+
+"You treat me like a child, but I'm a man. Your age! You hear--a man
+with a man's feelings for a woman--for you--Lilly. You're my--be my--"
+
+"You get out," she cried, her terror bursting out like a flame. "Get out
+or I'll call Mr. Alquist."
+
+She referred to the superintendent of the apartment building, although
+she knew him to be well out of hearing. It is probable that Harry knew,
+too, because he had her by the elbows, pressing them in against her body
+and her hair flowing across his face.
+
+"Lilly, Lilly, Lilly!" he kept repeating, breathing so heavily it
+sickened her to hear and feel it, and all the time fumbling with his
+free hand down into his waistcoat pocket, bringing up a bit of tissue
+paper which he tore at with his teeth, revealing the icy flash of a
+great oval diamond ring set up high in platinum. "It's yours, Lilly. I
+want to cover you with them. I want you to blaze with them--"
+
+He pressed it on her finger, pushing it down the entire length, danced
+her hand before her, catching her to him finally and crushing her and
+the flow of her hair to him, kissing so fiercely down that red marks
+came out against her whiteness, and when her cry finally rose to a
+shriek let go of her, staggering back, his face, never quite clean of
+pimples, suddenly fat-looking and with a lionlike thickening up of
+the features.
+
+"Ah--yah--yah--yah--yah!"
+
+His incoherence was horrible and she began to sob at him through
+hysteria.
+
+"You go! You get out! You stole that ring! You're a thief! You stole
+that ring!" she cried, thrusting it with a sudden quick hand down the V
+of his waistcoat. "Get out! Get out! Your grandmother--your--" Then,
+because words failed and her knees threatened to give way, she snatched
+up a book from the table, standing quivering and in the attitude
+of hurling.
+
+He did go then, as if the book had actually struck, making a detour of
+her and his knees quite bent as he walked.
+
+She finished her dressing in quick, fuddled movements, voice out in her
+breathing, buttoning up wrong and tearing open again in the grip of a
+nervous frenzy.
+
+A panicky need to gain the outdoors seized her; air to sweep and somehow
+to cleanse her.
+
+Before she was quite dressed, her belt not yet adjusted, in fact, the
+bell rang in three titters and a prolonged grill. She stood arrested,
+for some reason beginning all over her trembling. When Harry did not
+answer she went out herself, opening the door to a mere slit. A foot was
+pushed immediately in, crowding her back against the wall. Two men
+walked in, without removing derby hats, and at sight of them the
+nameless terror pinned her there in silence.
+
+"Harry Calvert live here?"
+
+She stood with her answer locked in her throat, conscious, on the
+moment, of Harry appearing in the kitchen doorway behind her. She
+wanted, for the same nameless reason, to motion him back, to shriek out
+a warning, to throw herself against his presence. To herself in quick
+repetitions:
+
+"O God, make him go back!"
+
+"Harry Calvert?"
+
+"Yes," replied Harry from where he stood.
+
+"Warrant for your arrest. Charged with entering the apartment of Mrs. J.
+King at Hotel Admiral and stealing one four-carat diamond ring valued
+at five thousand dollars. More evidence than we know what to do with.
+You better come quietly."
+
+"Harry, deny it! They've made a mistake! You haven't the right to come
+here at a time like this. There is sickness. His grandmother is dying at
+a hospital. You've made a mistake. Take me. I'll appear for him. I'll
+give his bail. All you want. Deny it, Harry. Harry!"
+
+For answer a sharp explosion rang suddenly into the narrow hallway,
+banging and reverberating against the walls, crowding faces out behind
+an immediate purplish smoke.
+
+"Harry! Harry! My God! Harry!"
+
+He crumpled up quietly, one shoulder in the lead and his left leg
+bending under him, straightening out then, with half a writhe to
+his back.
+
+"No! No! Help him! God! No! No! No!"
+
+But yes. Harry had shot himself, very truly, too, through the heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+There followed black weeks, with Mrs. Schum lying there on the edge of
+death, yet reluctant to go, Lilly's days an intricate pattern of
+hospital, office, and home.
+
+She was more tired than she knew and for days after the tragedy went
+about with a springy little sob just behind her throat, which was
+perpetually taut from holding back tears.
+
+The effect upon Zoe was telling. She whose solicitude for her mother had
+never been any too noteworthy and who with all the unthinking blitheness
+of an unthinking childhood had taken much for granted, developed,
+suddenly, a new consciousness.
+
+She would literally drag Lilly away from the pressing board.
+
+"Don't, Lilly. I'm old enough to iron out my own ribbons." Or: "Don't
+polish my shoes, Lilly. It's outrageous!"
+
+"But, Zoe, I would rather you put the time on practicing or reading."
+
+"I can do both."
+
+One Saturday morning she was even awakened to an aroma of coffee, her
+daughter standing attendant at the bedside with a tray of steaming
+breakfast.
+
+"Stay in bed this morning, Lilly. You look fagged. Let me take a message
+down to Visi for you. Oh, Lilly, do! I'll wear my new red tam."
+
+"Nonsense! I'm going down as usual."
+
+"But, Lilly, I want him to see me in it."
+
+Probably Lilly regarded her daughter a second longer than the occasion
+warranted, because Zoe broke away from the gaze somewhat redly.
+
+"Faugh! I hate him. He reminds me of a wild horse. But I'll show him
+some day that I'm on earth. I'm as full of my own ideals as he is
+of his."
+
+"Of course you are, dear; but why so angry?"
+
+"I'm not."
+
+Then Lilly rose, smiling as she dressed.
+
+The household was not easy of readjustment until finally were procured
+the services of one of the charwomen from the Bronx Theater, who
+prepared the meals and could flute Zoe's collars to the utmost delicacy.
+
+At this time Zoe was an advanced junior in High School, president of her
+class, although the hawklike tutelage of Cleofant Trieste had delayed
+graduation for a year, slowing down her curriculum to meet his demands
+of harmony, languages, rhythmic dancing, and sports. She had a long,
+sure swimming stroke that could carry her again her length, rode with
+the fine fluid movement of a young body at one with her mount, and
+because of her five hours a week at gymnasium excelled in the rather
+uncommon sport of handball.
+
+She no longer wore her hair in its great avalanche of curls down her
+back; they were caught in now with an amber barrette. Nights Lilly loved
+to brush them out until they flared to a dust of gold about her head.
+There was no light too dull for this hair to catch. It sprang out in
+radiance against any background.
+
+"When you sing Marguerite, Zoe, you won't need a wig."
+
+"Ah, but when I sing Electra--Thais--the real me--no namby-pamby
+Marguerite--no pearls--that's how I feel about Thais--as if she were a
+great opal full of fire. Hair," flopping her head backward with a bounce
+of curls, "is hot--it restricts. These curls--they are all hot and
+crawly around my neck, holding me."
+
+"Poor Harry! You remember how he used to love to take you out walking to
+show off your curls?"
+
+"Lilly, is Mrs. Schum going to get well?"
+
+"I don't know. It frightens me. I cannot bear to look ahead for her,
+poor dear."
+
+"If she gets well she'll have to know, won't she, that Harry didn't go
+to war?"
+
+"Yes, and somehow--I couldn't stand her knowing that."
+
+"She'll know it some day, anyhow."
+
+"Yes, but then maybe where it will be easier for her to understand."
+
+On her own responsibility Lilly had employed this subterfuge with Mrs.
+Schum. Slowly as she came clutching back at consciousness, the name of
+her grandson more and more on her twisted lips, Lilly whispered it down
+to her, closing her hand over the tired old bony one.
+
+"Listen, dear Mrs. Schum, I've--news for you."
+
+"They're all against him--"
+
+"No, no, dear. While you've been so ill, what we had hoped for has
+happened. Harry's been accepted, dear--he's enlisted."
+
+She crinkled her brow, trying to understand.
+
+"They wouldn't take him. He wanted to fight for his country. They were
+all against him--"
+
+"No, no, dear. It's all different now. Since our country is at war Harry
+has been accepted. The boys were rushed overnight to training camp.
+Thousands of them. He came weeks ago to tell you good-by, but you were
+too ill to know. He's on a transport now, dear, sailing to fight for his
+country. Aren't you proud? Aren't we all proud?"
+
+The poor hands began to tremble, feeling their way up along Lilly's arm.
+
+"Harry's gone--to war?"
+
+"Y-yes--dear."
+
+She seemed to speak then, through a pale transparent sleep, into which a
+new contentment pressed lightly.
+
+"Harry's gone. Annie, he's a soldier. He's so gentle with me, Annie, a
+meek child, like you were. Never any back talk or a harsh word. Whatever
+wrong he did was forced on him by those working against him. They were
+all against him. His Mamma-Annie knows. She bore him and I raised him.
+Fight, Harry! The streak from your father can't keep you down. Show
+them, Harry, show them. Whatever wrong my boy did was forced on him by
+those working against him--"
+
+"That's all past now, dear."
+
+"He liked you, Lilly. He'd have gone through fire for you. You were
+always good to my soldier boy. I was forever finding old bits of things
+that you had thrown away among his belongings. Don't tell him I told
+you. Old pencils and old gloves. He was a great one for gathering up
+things for keepsakes after you had thrown them away. Gloves--found some
+old ones of yours under his pillow one morning. Not taking things, you
+understand, but just pulled out of the rubbish heap for remembrance."
+
+"I do understand, dear."
+
+And so the weeks of her illness and of Lilly's deception dragged on.
+
+There were holes in the fabric of the story, obvious to any but Mrs.
+Schum's tired consciousness, and a too sudden inquiry could throw Lilly
+off her guard, but there was a flag with one shining service star
+glowing above the narrow bed, and evenings straight from the office
+Lilly would hasten to the hospital with fruits that could only be looked
+at, and newspapers to be unfurled and read.
+
+"Is his name in the papers yet?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I--You see, dear, the transport has just reached the other side."
+
+"My boy will show them--"
+
+The kindly spirit of the deception had fallen over the entire corridor.
+A maternity case in the room adjoining sent in a silk flag with
+hand-embroidered stars. The head nurse, herself on the eve of sailing
+for service, had shopped the flag with the one bright star. The doctor,
+fathering the lie, called her "captain" and saluted her upon entering
+the room with a flash of palm and a click of heels.
+
+She could smile at this, but with lips as blue and shriveled as drowned
+flesh.
+
+One night after she had dozed off and wandered into some phantasmagoria
+where she seemed to fancy herself seated in the bow of a boat with her
+daughter, she opened her eyes suddenly, reaching out for Lilly's hand.
+
+"Lilly, your poor mother. Do you ever think of her?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I do, dear."
+
+"You remember, Lilly, how she used to rush down right from the breakfast
+table to the bargain bins for those pink and blue mill-ends she used to
+dress you so pretty in. My! wasn't she one for Valenciennes lace,
+though! Wouldn't she just dress Zoe up, though--"
+
+"Wouldn't she!"
+
+"She was a good woman in her way, Lilly, even with all her fussing and
+nagging. My! how she did used to nag! I understood her. The ketchup. She
+was a great one for condiments and would have them all over the other
+boarders. Ketchup and the best cut of the meat for you and your father.
+There was just no pleasing her. But I understood her--she's a good
+woman, Lilly."
+
+"Indeed, mamma is good!"
+
+"It's not that I don't glory in you, Lilly, and your having a wonder
+child. You know I've always gloried in you. You've a head on you I
+always say that's going to carry you beyond us all, but don't you ever
+feel, Lilly, that maybe your doings have been wayward?"
+
+"I do. I do."
+
+"Your mother. Your father, as patient and as fine a man as breathed.
+Your husband, I don't know him, but life is so short. So terribly short.
+So full of pain and regrets for what can't be undone. That's why I
+cannot go and leave my boy behind--to suffer alone. I want him to go
+first. He's not strong. What is life, except doing for those we love?
+Don't you ever feel that about them out there, Lilly? Life is so
+short--such a struggle--alone--"
+
+"Dear Mrs. Schum, you--you--you're right."
+
+"Ah, I know---the young man in the box with you at 'The Web' that night
+it opened. Your boss. I know! He likes you, that young man does, Lilly.
+It's easy to see it in his eyes for you. That's why it's dangerous.
+Harry likes you, too--but not that way, I think. He saves your old
+gloves. That's always struck me as funny. They're all against him. The
+fire escapes; that's why I lock the doors. You hear--the fire escapes.
+Poor Lilly! just a little too much ambition and not quite enough talent
+to reach. I used to predict for you all the things that are cropping out
+in your child. Zoe is to be the one, Lilly. Not you--or Harry--or
+Mamma-Annie--Zoe! Funny his saving your gloves--"
+
+These were the times that Lilly would sit there crying, old musty
+memories rising around her like kicked-up dust. There were whole
+evenings when her mother's name was constantly on the not always
+coherent lips, and to Lilly the old sense of the unreality of her
+universe, or was it herself, laid somewhat, by the busy years, would
+come surging again. Where were the visions for which she had climbed,
+spike-shod, up that loving wall of living flesh back there? How long
+since her last dream of self had vanished? Zoe was her answer.
+
+One evening when Lilly arrived home from the hospital she found Zoe
+squatting in bed, her face naughtily screwed into a little grimalkin
+knot, elbows pressed into her sides, palms up, and all attitudinized to
+emulate a Chinese god. Holding this pose for a full minute after Lilly
+had entered the room, she began to bounce in hilarity up and down on the
+mattress, probably to allay her own sense of inner unease.
+
+For the full round of the minute Lilly stared, her glance widening and
+darkening. Something had happened to Zoe. Something horrid.
+
+"Don't you love it, Lilly? Don't stand there like you're frozen.
+Everybody loves it. All the models down at Daab's are wearing it this
+way. Thais does. Jeanne d'Arc does. Don't look at me that way."
+
+Zoe had bobbed her hair. It hung quite straight, and in an outstanding
+shock, because of its thickness, just below her ears. Franz Hals would
+have loved the rectilinear contour of her. She was saucy. She was
+abbreviated. She was naughty; and liked to flop her head about for the
+soft throw of her hair.
+
+Her mother dropped rather than sat on a chair edge, trying to keep down
+the storm of anger that had her by the throat and eyeballs.
+
+"Your curls! All gone! Your beautiful hair! What have you done? You
+wicked girl! You--wicked--girl--you!"
+
+It was the first time in all the largesse of her youth that such a tone
+had assailed Zoe. The very seventeenness of her revolted; she dropped
+her attitude.
+
+"Why, Lilly--you--you're talking like other--mothers."
+
+But the spank in Lilly's hand was suddenly singing against her palm and
+there was a rush of her not so forbearing forefathers to the very front.
+
+"You horrid girl! How dared you? Don't come near me! Your beautiful hair
+that I've never been too tired to brush for hours! To have realized
+those gorgeous curls in you and for--for this! You horrid, selfish
+girl--selfish--selfish!"
+
+All during this, her naughtiness fallen from her like a cloak, Zoe sat
+regarding her parent, her lower lip less and less steady. She might have
+been stunned, trying to keep her equilibrium by a series of rapid little
+blinks, Lilly meanwhile sunk into a heap and crying down into her hands.
+
+"Lilly--dearest--darling--est--"
+
+"Don't talk to me."
+
+"But, Lilly--you--you've always wanted me to be true to myself."
+
+"You're not true to yourself. You're true to a pose, a silly fad that
+you've picked up around the Daab studio."
+
+"You always said if I wanted to be a circus rider I could, just so I was
+better than all the other circus riders. Well, I wanted to have my hair
+bobbed and I bobbed it bobbiest."
+
+"Your comparison is stupid. You know it is. You've never taken a step
+before without talking it over with me. You know perfectly well I should
+not have interfered. I should have tried to make you see the folly of
+cutting off your beautiful curls, but if you had still insisted, off
+they might have come just the same. I think it is that as much as the
+loss of the curls. Your privilege has become a license. You've made
+everything seem ridiculous--me--you."
+
+"Then you've made me so. If you want me to be like other girls you
+should have reared me like other girls. Have other girls' fathers who
+don't know they are on earth? Have other girls' mothers who--"
+
+"Zoe!"
+
+As if the words had been live coals scuttling off her lips before she
+knew, Zoe sat back, staring at her mother's stare, scalding tears
+already welling.
+
+"Lilly, forgive me. I--I wish I could cut my tongue out. I didn't mean
+it that way; you know I didn't. If you don't forgive me I can't stand
+it," the stabbing consciousness of that impulsively flung reproach
+already through her like a hurting wound.
+
+"You are right, Zoe, I--"
+
+"I didn't mean one word, Lilly darling, not one eeny word. It's just
+that all of a sudden it seemed to me to be the freest, gladdest thing in
+the world to cut off my hair. That's it, free! Haven't you ever had
+that feeling, darling? Free! I wouldn't have done it, Lilly, if I had
+known how it would hurt. Lilly--darling--mother. If I've hurt you I want
+to just die. My own dear--Lilly--"
+
+Her voice caught on the crest of a sob and she was at her mother's feet,
+seeking out her lap, tears rushing down over her incoherence.
+
+"I'll grow it back again for you, Lilly. I'll make it up to you,
+sweetheart. I didn't mean that--what I said about fathers or--or other
+girls--you know I didn't. I'm bad. Terrible."
+
+In some alarm, Lilly placed her hand on the shorn head, shuddering in
+spite of herself as if the ends were bleeding.
+
+"Sh-h-h, Zoe! It upset me, dear, that's all--the shock of seeing you
+sitting up in bed there--with it off."
+
+"I'll make it up to you, Lilly. In so many ways. Soon. It's settled,
+dear, that Auchinloss is coming to America in the fall to conduct.
+Trieste is going to arrange my audition for September. He promised
+to-day I'd be ready. Think, Lilly, my audition so soon. I'll have the
+wig made out of my own hair, dear, for Marguerite. Don't feel badly,
+Lilly; the wig will look--"
+
+"I don't any more, Zoe. It was just the shock--"
+
+"I know it was silly, dear, but it will grow quickly and I just had that
+feeling to be free--you see, dear--"
+
+"I do see, dear, I do. Zoe, look at me. Doesn't it ever come over you,
+on the eve of so much, dear--that perhaps you do need his--your
+father's guardianship--"
+
+"Now just because I said _that_. I tell you I'm a devil. I didn't mean
+it--not one word--"
+
+"I know you didn't. It cropped out unconsciously. You're not to blame.
+He's a good man, Zoe, your father, and his steady hand might do much
+where I--may have failed."
+
+"If you talk that way I can't stand it. You tell me so often he's a good
+man, I wonder if he really is--"
+
+"You're getting beyond me, Zoe. I wonder if the day isn't inevitable
+when you are going to break out more and more into unconscious
+reproach."
+
+"Lilly--no--no--"
+
+"Oh, I don't only mean what you said just now. But it's on my mind more
+and more, now that you are old enough to decide for yourself. You cannot
+be sucked back any more into a life you would not tolerate. You can
+choose. That is what I have been waiting for. Doesn't the ache ever come
+over you, Zoe, to see your father? Just a natural instinctive ache, if
+nothing else--your grandparents--"
+
+"No! No! No! I hate it all as you hated it. If you want to punish me
+terribly--for saying something I didn't mean--just talk them to me. I
+want wideness, must have it! Room! I--I could say it in music better
+than in words. Some day I shall compose a song that says it for
+me--the--the way I feel it. Don't stop now saving me from them. Wait.
+Wait, Lilly, until I sing. Trieste understands even better than you. I'm
+the surprise he keeps hinting about to everyone. I'm going to bowl them
+over at my audition. Lilly--have I ever failed you? Have I ever come in
+second for you? No, and I never will. You won't ever be sorry, Lilly--on
+my account. You won't even care that I've cut off my hair. Lilly dear,
+do you believe me? I'm always going to come in first for you. First!"
+
+"I do, dear, I do."
+
+And of course in the end they sobbed together, and lay far into the
+dawn, cheek to cheek, until finally Zoe dropped off to sleep and Lilly
+lay wide-eyed beside her, the perfume of her child's soft breathing
+against her cheek.
+
+The next morning in the reading room of the Public Library a notice
+catapulted itself at Lilly from the second page of the St. Louis
+Globe-Democrat:
+
+L.H. Hines, president, and Albert Penny, vice president of Slocum-Hines
+Hardware Company, leave shortly for Washington, where they have been
+called to give expert advice upon installing American Canteen Service.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+The day that followed seemed to Lilly vague with a sort of fog. A
+disturbing something lay against her consciousness and one of her
+unquiet nights was filled with the unaccountable crying. But morning
+invariably brought back reality and her workaday could envelop her
+busily, even happily.
+
+Meanwhile, war, like a spreading wing, had blackened against the
+international sky. Somme, Vimy Ridge, Aisne had been bled, and more than
+ever the streets that led toward the embarkation points were the color
+of khaki, women frequently running alongside, crying and laughing
+bewildered farewells.
+
+Some of this war hysteria, of which she was really no integral part,
+had, however, hold of Lilly. Her throat ached with it. Her state cropped
+out in her work. One afternoon she traveled to Newark for the purpose of
+seeing a Japanese sleight-of-hand act, and came away without sufficient
+impression of any kind to pass judgment.
+
+Bruce Visigoth eyed her closely.
+
+"You're tired," he said, commenting upon her failure to turn in the
+report. "You need a rest."
+
+"No," she said, "it's just--a little of everything--I guess--then Harry
+Calvert--that was a shock, you see, and now his grandmother. I'm with
+her at the hospital every evening--and then this war--this futile
+bleeding--horror."
+
+He could never, with her, keep his tone as level as his manner.
+
+"Lilly," he burst out, "drop it all for a couple of weeks. You and the
+youngster come out to the place in Tarrytown. There are some things I
+want to talk over with you. I'm working now to obtain the rights to that
+little beauty from the Spanish you gave me to read. I'm going to produce
+after this war mess slows down. It is the exquisite kind of thing I'd
+expect you to find."
+
+"I didn't. Zoe read it to me one evening. She was the one to see its
+possibilities."
+
+"It's spring, Lilly, and I want you to see the place. My sister Pauline
+moved in last week. I want you to be our first guest. It's
+spring, Lilly--"
+
+It was his first mention to her of the recent purchase of a
+one-hundred-acre estate at Tarrytown, although in her capacity of notary
+public she had officiated at the drawing up of certain papers and deed.
+Blue prints of plans had passed through her hands. That he had furnished
+it she knew, too, from the magnitude of breath-taking bills from
+decorators and dealers exclusive antique. It had piqued her more than
+she would admit, his failure to solicit even her advice or opinion.
+There was a framed photograph of plans on his desk in the office which
+her eyes studiously avoided. Furtively and with the edge of her gaze,
+she knew the house to be a low-length with Tudor peaks to it that gave
+her a nostalgia for pools of green quiet and the leafy whisperings of
+English countrysides she had never seen.
+
+"I want you out at the place, Lilly, more than I can say. Please come.
+The way things are clouding up, there is no telling how soon they'll let
+me over for active service. Lilly?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I can't. Zoe graduates next month, and--"
+
+"Good Lord! the youngster!"
+
+"Seventeen."
+
+He whistled.
+
+"Well, I'll be hanged. The sun-kid. Bring her out too, Lilly."
+
+"Trieste is very strict with her. She is preparing for her audition in
+September, and even if it could be managed, there is poor Mrs. Schum,
+you know."
+
+His eagerness would not endure obstacle.
+
+"Bring her out, too. How's that, Lilly? I'll send a limousine full of
+pillows for her. It will take Pauline's mind off her loneliness, having
+some one to mother. We'll put her up in a sun room with a view of pine
+woods and Hudson River that cannot be surpassed. It's spring--Lilly--"
+
+"Poor Mrs. Schum!" she replied, her smile tired and twisted. "I'm afraid
+her next journey will be a longer one than that."
+
+"Poor soul! Does she still think that boy of hers is fighting?"
+
+"Surely there is no wrong in saving her from the horror of the truth."
+
+"You dear girl, of course, no. It's only that--somehow don't you think
+that before she passed on she ought to know that he's gone on
+before--even if you have to tell her that he died--gloriously?"
+
+"I've thought of that," she said, looking away, "thought and thought of
+it."
+
+"Lilly," he cried, reaching for her two hands She drew them back quickly
+and walked out.
+
+That evening when she presented herself at the hospital the nurse met
+her outside the door with her finger to her lips.
+
+"She is sinking, but conscious."
+
+Confronted with her emergency, Lilly stood before that closed door,
+beating all over with her silent little prayer:
+
+"O God, help me! Help me, help her!"
+
+Mrs. Schum was quite conscious.
+
+"Lilly," she said, reaching out a thin old hand that was covered with
+veins as round as cables, "I've been waiting."
+
+"Here I am, dear."
+
+"I think I'm done, Lilly. I--dream so much--of God."
+
+"Why, you're better, dear!"
+
+"No. I'm going. I wanted so to wait for my boy. The doctor, can't he
+help me to wait, Lilly? Ask him to help me to wait. I keep thinking he's
+over there somewhere--Harry--funny isn't it? Over there waiting. You've
+heard no news, Lilly?"
+
+In this moment more propitious than she dared hope Lilly leaned over.
+
+"Yes, dear, there is news."
+
+"Harry?" she said quickly and sharply, lifting her head.
+
+"Yes, dear--Harry--is--over there--waiting."
+
+"His Mamma-Annie's boy--they were all against him. He can't stay back
+here alone--he needs me, doctor--help me to wait for him--"
+
+"Listen, dear--Harry's gone."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Why--over there--just as your intuition told you."
+
+She pulled at the sheet with fingers as fleshless as the feet of a bird,
+moving her lips, vainly at first, and suddenly jerked herself up with a
+strength no doctor would have conceded her.
+
+"He's dead, Lilly. My boy's dead. Please--please--it is so--isn't it? My
+boy's dead?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I knew it. Oh, Annie, you're the mother of a soldier. God wouldn't let
+me leave him back here--alone. I wouldn't have left him. There wasn't
+any good ahead for him. That's why I wanted him to die like a soldier.
+Before he should come to the bad places ahead. I can go so easy now. I'm
+done. God fixed it for me--Lilly."
+
+She held the racked old form to her, kissed away tears that the washed
+old eyes could hardly yield, made a couch of her arms, and held her
+close so that their heartbeats met.
+
+"Lilly, I feel so easy. I never felt so easy."
+
+"Lie quietly, dear."
+
+"Life can be hard, Lilly. And now--war. Make it easier for yourself.
+Don't let him out there--go over there--anywhere--reproaching. Your
+parents--your child--it's his as much as yours, Lilly. If I had gone
+first, my boy would have reproached. There is nothing so terrible,
+Lilly--as eyes that reproach--eyes--Lilly--don't."
+
+"I--won't."
+
+She drifted off then in the placidity of a sleep from which she was not
+to emerge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lilly walked home that early morning following. Her direction lay in a
+straight line through Central Park. Spring was out in firstlings of
+every kind. The baby nap of new grass. Trees ready to quiver into leaf.
+The sun came up from behind a sky line of skyscrapers, and as she was
+crossing the Mall a fountain rained up a first joyous geyser, some
+sparrows immediately plunging for a bath.
+
+She sat down on a bench there in the lovely quiet, quite lax, and,
+because of its pressure, her natty little blue sailor in her lap. The
+air was like cool water and she closed her tired eyes to it.
+
+Finally children began to trot past on their way to school. She heard
+their shouts and watched them. A father passed with his little girl by
+the hand and carrying her sheaf of books. A boy in knickerbockers lunged
+furiously on roller skates. Another drove his ball under her bench and
+she smiled as she drew aside to let him drive. A private in khaki threw
+her a flirtatious glance. The sun found her finally.
+
+Then Lilly followed one of her curious and absolutely irrepressible
+impulses, one that must have been smoldering who knows how long.
+
+She completed her walk through the Park. At Seventy-second Street, where
+she emerged, a family hotel, one of those _de luxe_ mausoleums to family
+life, reared showily. Without pause she turned in there, finding out the
+telegraph desk; wrote her message largely and flowingly, leaning over
+while the operator read out the words to her:
+
+Mr. Albert Penny, 5198 Page Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri. Won't you
+include New York in your visit to Washington and if possible bring
+parents. Try to. Lilly Penny, 2348 West End Avenue.
+
+Hearing that telegram repeated, the pencil marking time word by word, it
+seemed to Lilly that each one of them was released with the spring of an
+arrow from its bow, and that the operator recoiled, stunned, from the
+impact of the message.
+
+"Well," she said, leaning farther over the desk, and for some reason
+shaping the word to a breathless question.
+
+"Fifty-one cents," said the girl, through the inimitable laconism of gum
+chewing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Six hours later there was a reply folded in Lilly's purse:
+
+We leave to-day for Washington. Arrive New York next Sunday 2.03 _via_
+Pennsylvania. Albert Penny.
+
+An incredible state of calm set in. She had the sensation of each
+intervening day a shelf of terrace down which she was walking into a
+deepening sea. Dreams ill-flavored as Orestes' filled her nights, and
+how tired she was must have sopped into her pillow, but her capacity for
+the present lessened her dread and made more bearable the fluent and
+fateful passing of the time.
+
+There were the details of the poor little funeral to be arranged. Lilly,
+who had never known death, was suddenly face to face with it again, at a
+time, too, when the incipient beginnings of pandemic that was later to
+scourge the country was reaping its first harvest; a strange malady
+carried on the stinking winds of war, shooting up in spouty little
+flames, that, no sooner laid, found new dry rot to feed upon. Spanish
+influenza, it was called, for no more visible reason than that it
+probably had its beginnings in Germany or India.
+
+On the Wednesday of Mrs. Schum's funeral five of the Amusement
+Enterprise office force were home with it, one little telephone
+operator, who occasionally laid the surreptitious offering of an orange
+or a carnation on Lilly's desk, succumbing.
+
+It was amazing how light the imprint of Harry and his grandmother. Of
+effects there were practically none. A few tired-looking old dresses of
+Mrs. Schum's. Eleven dollars and some odd change in a tin box behind a
+clock. Harry's pinch-back suit with the slanting pockets. A
+daguerreotype or two. The inevitable stack of modest enough but unpaid
+bills. Odds. Ends. And in a wooden soap box shoved beneath Harry's cot,
+old door bells, faucets, bits of pipe, glass door knobs, and, laid
+reverently apart, a stack of Lilly's discarded gloves, placed to
+simulate the print of the hand.
+
+For days, Zoe, who had taken the tired willingness of Mrs. Schum so for
+granted, cried herself bitterly into a state that threatened to take the
+form of a fever, and then to the strophe and antistrophe of her young
+grief, becoming self-conscious, burst, with not particularly precocious
+rhyme, reason, or meter, into the following, which was printed in her
+school paper:
+
+     "Teach me to live, O God,
+      If sorrow be to live,
+      Then let me know
+        All pain that it can give."
+
+     "Teach me to live, O God,
+      To know the gold from dross,
+      To live, dear God, to live.
+        I care not what it cost."
+
+And Lilly, the dear mother dust in her eyes, had the page framed beneath
+a faded photograph of Mrs. Schum, taken when her lips and breast
+were young.
+
+To attune Zoe to the coming of her family was no small matter. She was
+outrageously rebellious, flagrantly irreverent, and for every outburst
+Lilly bled her sense of blame.
+
+"You've made a farce of everything, Lilly. You've fought for a
+principle and, with it won, turned maudlin. What is the idea? To drag me
+back there to join the sewing circle and the local society for the
+prevention of spinsterhood to maidens?"
+
+"You are not funny at all. You know you are clear of that kind of thing.
+You're like an arrow on its way to its goal. Straight and sure. Nothing
+can deflect you. That's why I dared."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"Realizations can come, Zoe, even to a selfishness as great as mine has
+been."
+
+"Sacrifice is not always beautiful. It can be silly and futile."
+
+"Zoe!"
+
+"Yes, and bring rewards to neither side. Half the people who are
+sacrificed for become tearful tyrants, and those who do the sacrificing
+sour and meek, or holy with righteousness."
+
+"You are reciting the kind of thing you hear down at Daab's."
+
+"I'm reciting you."
+
+"You darling boomerang!"
+
+"I suppose now you are sorry you didn't stay at home in your canary cage
+to no one's particular advantage and your own terrific disadvantage. Now
+that you have reared me into the kind of human being you set out to be,
+you renig. Do you want to throw me back into that bowl with the greased
+sides that you managed to climb out of? Not much."
+
+This from Zoe, mixed metaphor and all, who at seventeen kept _Doll's
+House_, Freud, _Anna Karenina_, and Ellen Key on the table beside
+her bed.
+
+"Theories go down, Zoe, before life--and death."
+
+She sat haughtily young, and without tolerance, her profile averted and
+trying to keep the quiver off her lips.
+
+"Just when I'm ready to graduate and preparing for my audition--to have
+this--"
+
+"Zoe--Zoe--don't make it harder--"
+
+"I'm a dog, Lilly--forgive me."
+
+"The entire abominable condition is my fault--"
+
+"Then thank God for the abominable condition. I love you and everything
+you've done."
+
+"Then be sweet to them for my sake. Your grandmother, she's going to be
+unlike anyone you have ever known. She's a great one to pick up the
+bread crumbs of life with a great ado. That's been her existence,
+dear--little things. And your grandfather, Zoe, he's so gentle. Somehow
+I imagine he is even gentler now. You remember I used to tell you how
+we'd play at hide and seek long after I was grown. Oh, Zoe, be sweet!"
+
+"I will, dear."
+
+"And--your father. Whatever his attitude may be, remember the fault lies
+in me--not him."
+
+"Trust me, Lilly, if only he doesn't drop dead when he sees me!"
+
+"Zoe!"
+
+Between them the little drama was carefully rehearsed.
+
+"Visi would pay big money for this act."
+
+"You'll be your own natural sweet self, Zoe? No posing?"
+
+"Don't worry. I suppose if the truth is known I'll have an aggravated
+case of stage fright."
+
+"They'll know--everything, Zoe, before I let them see you. Just be
+simple, dear--and please--no dramatics!"
+
+"It's all too dramatic for dramatics," she replied, cryptically.
+
+It was finally decided that Lilly was to meet the train alone, settle
+the trio at the Hotel Astor, and arrive at the apartment in time for a
+dinner prepared by a cook and waitress especially brought in for
+the day.
+
+"Break the news in a public place, Lilly--the hotel lobby or a
+taxi---and avoid family fireworks."
+
+"My news can't be broken."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Smashed, rather."
+
+At four o'clock the morning of the arrival, Lilly was up, moving with
+the aimlessness of great nervousness about the apartment. At that same
+hour Mrs. Becker was emerging backward from her sleeper, kimono-clad,
+and bulging through the curtains into the dark aisle.
+
+"Carrie," her husband whispered after her, jutting his head out with a
+turtle's dart, "it's only three o'clock, Eastern time. Why are you
+getting up?"
+
+"Because I want to," she said, plowing on.
+
+Once in the dressing room, she fell to crying as she staggered and
+dressed, apparently because each object, as she took it up, fell from
+her fingers.
+
+And yet the meeting occurred, as dreaded and anticipated moments often
+do, damply, and as a heavily loaded bomb, for one reason or another, can
+go off with a cat cough.
+
+To the observer, what happened that early afternoon was simply a very
+trim and very tailored young woman, her boyishness of attire somewhat
+accentuated because her swift clean-cutness was so obviously its
+inspiration, greeting, in the marble vastness of Grand Central Terminal,
+a trio of what was plainly a pair of travel-stained parents and
+perhaps an uncle.
+
+Standing there peering between the grillwork as the train slid in
+through the greasy gloom, watching the run of "red caps" and the slow
+disgorging of passengers, Lilly saw it all in waves of movement, waves
+of heat, waves of gaseous unreality.
+
+Then she spied them. Her mother in the old, familiar vanguard, her
+father with that bulge to his back from which the gray coat hung
+loosely, Albert struggling to save his luggage from the fiery piracy of
+a "red cap."
+
+Her first sense was of fatness, their incredible, caravaning,
+lumbaginous fatness! There was a new chin to her mother. Gone was the
+old pulled-in waistline, but the old love of finery was out on her hat
+in ostrich plumes, a boa of marabou lending further elegance. And her
+father! He was somehow behind himself, slanting out from neck to quite a
+bulge of abdomen, then receding again to legs that caught her throat
+with a sense of their being too thin to sustain him. The fringe of hair
+that showed beneath his slouch hat was quite white, too, and with that
+same clutch at her throat she saw that it was thin as a baby's can
+be thin.
+
+It is doubtful if she would have known Penny. He was himself in
+sebaceous italics. The old stolidity of stature was there, but hardly
+the solidity. Like Mrs. Becker, he had chubbied up, so to speak, until
+he looked shorter. And Albert was bald. It showed out under the rear of
+his derby, like a well-scrubbed visage awaiting some deft hand to sketch
+in the features, as poor Harry had done it to the clothespins. His
+Scandinavian blondness was quite gone; there was just a fringe of tan
+hair left and his jowls hung a bit, of skin not quite filled
+with flesh.
+
+All this in a telegraphic flash as she stood there waiting, and at the
+sight of her father, on his too thin legs, dragging his cane slightly so
+that it scraped, and in the other hand a sagging old black valise that
+she remembered, all the tightness at her throat relaxed suddenly, the
+tears coming so easily that she could smile through them.
+
+The dragging of that cane, it hurt her poignantly, as little vagrant
+memories can.
+
+They spied her out even as she spied them, and, bodybeat to bodybeat,
+she and her mother met, shaking to silent sobs and twisting hearts. Then
+her father, pressing the coldly smelling mustache to her lips and
+lifting her in the old way by the armpits, so that the instant closed
+over her like a swoon.
+
+With Albert it was strangely easier; there was a pause as wide as a hair
+while he stood there blinking, and weighted with his unsurrendered
+luggage.
+
+"Albert," she said, finding the word at last.
+
+At that moment, a "red cap," wild for fee, made for one of the brand-new
+leather cases.
+
+"Let go," he cried, in small anger. "That is a
+six-dollar-and-ninety-eight-cent bag you are jerking."
+
+Then he brought his gaze back to Lilly, his Adam's apple above the gray
+necktie throbbing so that it seemed to her his entire body must
+reverberate to the pistonlike process.
+
+"Well," he said. "Well, well," the words dropping down into the dry well
+of a gulp.
+
+But somehow after the episode of the luggage, everything was easier, for
+Lilly at least. She could smile now.
+
+Very presently they were actually in a taxicab together, the talk of
+the moment echoing against the silence of unspoken words taking shape
+between them.
+
+"Papa!" she said, finally, from the little folding seat opposite him,
+stroking his hands and steadying herself with them against the throw of
+the cab. "Oh, papa, papa!"
+
+He smiled back through crinkles that were new to her, patting her in
+turn and looking off.
+
+Mrs. Becker fell to crying, pressing her handkerchief up against her
+eyes and trying to lift her veil above the tears.
+
+"After all these years," she kept repeating. "Years. Years."
+
+"Now, now, Carrie--you promised."
+
+"What hotel?" asked Penny, one of the bags across his knees and one
+weather eye for the other on the driver's seat.
+
+"The Astor; that is one of the best. I've your rooms all arranged for.
+My--my place is too small."
+
+"A less expensive would do, wouldn't it, mother?" addressing himself,
+without once meeting Lilly's eye, to his mother-in-law.
+
+"You're my guests," she said, trying to smile down old aversions. "This
+is my party."
+
+"Years--" sobbed Mrs. Becker. "She looks the same, but I'm a stranger to
+my own child. Ben, we're strangers."
+
+They were all suddenly in tears, Mr. Becker laying a clumsy hand to his
+wife's arm.
+
+"Carrie, you promised--"
+
+"Can't help it--can't help it," her lips bubbling. "I'm bursting with
+it. All these years. I can't hold in. What mother could?"
+
+Only their arrival at the hotel stemmed the rising tide, but, once up
+in their aerial suite of rooms, the last bell hop tipped out, then broke
+the storm wave, flaying them all.
+
+"Lilly--Lilly let me look at you. Baby--are you my baby--are you mine?
+Years--O God--years--"
+
+"Mamma--mamma--"
+
+"Feel my heart. Ben--tell her--what I've suffered--"
+
+"Carrie--now--now--what is past is past; we must look to the present
+now."
+
+"Papa dear--you look so changed and yet so--natural--"
+
+There was an air of indescribable prosperity that rose off Mr. Becker,
+in the nondescript but excellent quality of the gray suiting, the
+polished, square-toed, custom-made shoes, the little linen string of
+necktie, one for each day, the kind, despite family suasion, he had
+always worn. But it was difficult for him to speak now because he was
+always blinking and looking off.
+
+"You've given us a great sorrow to bear, Lilly," he said, in a tone of
+rehearsed reproach. "We tried to be thankful for our health
+and--bear our--"
+
+"There he goes on health again at a time like this. I'm a broken woman.
+Years! Years of explaining lies to the community. Years of holding up
+our heads over an opera singer that nobody ever hears about and that
+never came home to her folks. Years of feeling them laugh behind our
+backs--your father and husband trying to hold up their heads in business
+under the lie. What have I ever done, I've asked myself all these
+years--to deserve it? I've never harmed anyone. I've--"
+
+"Carrie--please."
+
+"Where do you live? How do you live? A stranger to my own child. Worse
+than a stranger!"
+
+"I've a well-paid position with a producing firm, mamma, and I live
+nicely. You shall see, dear."
+
+"Producing? Producing what? Trouble? A position! For that she threw away
+her life. Her big talk of prima donna, and we find her in a position.
+The girl that was going to set the world on fire. That's why we looked
+our eyes out all these years for her name in the paper, only to find her
+in a position! Ben, what have we ever done to deserve it? Albert, I'm
+her mother, but my heart bleeds for you--"
+
+He was tugging at his bag straps, industriously keeping his head
+averted, but the red up in his ears.
+
+"Mother," he said, "did you pack my throat atomizer?"
+
+She licked up at the taste of her tears.
+
+"It's wrapped in between your socks. You're standing in a draught,
+Albert; close that window. You heard that man in the train about the
+epidemic of colds that is starting all over the country. O my God! I'm
+just so upset. And now that it has happened everything is so different.
+I could tear out my tongue for what I want to say and I can't say
+anything--not so much your father and I--at least we had Albert to help
+make it up to us. We know what a son he has been, don't we, Ben, but to
+think of him, the upstandingest boy that ever wore shoe leather--him
+having to suffer for it--"
+
+"Carrie, Carrie, it's time to go over all that later. Let's get our
+bearings. Lilly, you've not changed except for the bones kind of
+setting and--"
+
+"I don't like you in those shirt waists. Too mannish. The lace I used to
+dress that child in! The way I used to love to poke in the
+bins--sacrificed for her. These years--years. Lilly--tell me you've been
+a good girl--that your sinning has only been against us--child that I
+raised--Lilly--"
+
+They were locked in embrace again, Mrs. Becker blown hot and cold by the
+ever-shifting clouds of her emotions, the two men standing by in a state
+of helplessness that was always in inverse proportion to the lavalike
+eruptions from the crater of her nerves.
+
+"Mother, father and I will leave you alone for a while and you have your
+talk together first--"
+
+"No! She's your wife. You have yours first! It's about time you were
+coming into some of your rights!"
+
+Such a fiery redness was out in Albert's ears that against the lights
+they were of the translucency of red-hot iron, and even through her pity
+for his _malaise_, her old poignant distaste of him would not be laid.
+She wanted him to lunge somehow with that bull-like head of his with the
+bashedin squareness to its top, but since nothing like that happened,
+she sprang up instead, grasping her mother's hand.
+
+"Not now," she cried. "I want to tell you all something first, and then
+I want to take you--to my place--to see where--the way I live--"
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Becker, rising with a crinkling of nose and drawing her
+marabout boa about her, "I want to see the way you live--first. Guests
+of hers at a hotel like this. A position, she tells me.
+Lilly--Lilly--for God's sake tell me you've been a good girl--"
+
+"Carrie!" At the sound of rare thunder in her husband's voice she did
+subside then. Later she began.
+
+"Nice rooms. Nicer than in Chicago that time. Albert, let me give you a
+clean handkerchief out of the valise.... No, you don't know where they
+are. Don't like that shirt waist. Too mannish. Don't worry about those
+pillows, Albert. I brought your little one along. Glass tops. That's
+nice, isn't it? How would you like one for your chiffonier at home,
+Albert? Quit whittling toothpicks on the floor, Ben--Oh dear! if
+somebody don't say something, I'll scream--"
+
+"Come, mamma--papa--Albert. I want to take you--home, and while we drive
+up there I want to talk to you."
+
+But once within the cab and with her mother's constant runnel of talk
+and its threat of hysteria, courage failed Lilly, so she sat back,
+holding herself against rising panic and her mind refusing to hook
+tentacles into the situation toward which they were speeding.
+
+"You look mighty well, Lilly," her father would repeat, gently; "not
+much changed, but a little more settled--in the bones--"
+
+"Who does your darning and mending?"
+
+"I do, mamma. See, this is Broadway, papa. We're just rounding the
+famous Columbus Circle."
+
+"I don't see much difference between this and St. Louis. Do you, Ben?
+Just stores and stores like there are on Olive Street. Oh, look! There
+is one of the Ryan Cut Price Drug Stores, just like we have at home.
+Look at the crowds around that thing--what's that? 'Subway,' it says--"
+
+"Lilly, Lilly, it makes me tremble when I think of you in this great
+city alone."
+
+"Why, papa, I never was so safe."
+
+"It's not decent, that's what it's not."
+
+"Now, Carrie--"
+
+"Stop cutting me off every time I open my mouth."
+
+"How far is it?" asked Albert, speaking for the first time.
+
+"Why, I guess it ought to take about ten minutes from here," replied
+Lilly, grateful for the question and trying to meet his averted glance.
+
+He withdrew quite a disk of silver watch, reading it carefully.
+
+"We're already on the way seven and a quarter minutes," he said.
+
+"Albert," she began, "there is something I want to--ought to--tell
+you--first--"
+
+"Albert, close that window next to you."
+
+"I--don't quite know--how to begin--"
+
+"Close it all the way, Albert, you're still in a draught."
+
+Suddenly Lilly sat back, silent holding her father's hand the rest of
+the way.
+
+But no sooner were the three of them safely into the little front room
+than, without even seating them, she rushed out to forestall Zoe.
+
+But too late. That young lady herself had already appeared between the
+curtains of the alcove. She had done the outlandish, the outrageous, the
+irrelevant thing.
+
+An old red rep portiere wound tightly around her body to below the
+armpits, and held there by skillfully adjusted bands of black velvet, a
+fillet of the same so low that it touched her eyebrows secured about her
+boxed and brilliantly blond hair, she held the half-profile pose of a
+Carmencita, a pair of ten-cent-store black earrings dangling and her
+upflung gesture one of defiance, mischief with an unmistakable dash of
+irrepressible dramatics.
+
+In a silence that shaped itself to a grin, Lilly, caught midstep as it
+were, stood regarding her daughter. She wanted to scream, to throw back
+her head and shout her hysteria, to spank her daughter bodily there
+across her knees, and more than that she wanted to laugh! Enormous
+laughter, to allay her sense of madness.
+
+Instead she found voice, which, when it came, was not her own, for
+thinness.
+
+"Albert," she said, "this is your daughter--Zoe."
+
+"Ben," whispered Mrs. Becker, out of a fantastic cave of silence and
+rising suddenly from her chair to plant herself on the overstuffed
+divan, where there was more horizontal room--"Ben, I think I'm going
+to faint."
+
+And she did.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Yet within a week Mrs. Becker, through all the fog of her bewilderment,
+was embroidering seed pearls on her granddaughter's white
+graduation slippers.
+
+Forty years of dogged loyalty to the white string ties, fresh every day,
+had gone down before seventeen's mandate; and to Ben Becker's
+unspeakable sheepishness, he had appeared one evening in an impeccable
+dark-blue knitted cravat, his collar, of cut heretofore easily inclusive
+of chin, snugger to his neck, and flowing out to slight points.
+
+"So you let her bamboozle you into something I couldn't accomplish in
+thirty-eight years," was Mrs. Becker's sole comment through a mouthful
+of seed pearls.
+
+"Nonsense! The child has ideas. These collars don't dig in."
+
+"Humph! She's had you around her little finger from the start."
+
+"Now, Carrie, why do you say that?"
+
+"Because it's true," trying not to smile.
+
+It was.
+
+An immediate _entente cordiale_ had shaped itself around Zoe and her
+grandfather. She named him with her usual fantastic aptitude.
+
+"Dapple-dear," she would have it, and could not explain the choice. It
+must have been some such remote analogy as his likeness to an old
+dapple-gray family horse, patient flanked and thoroughly imperturbable
+to the fleck of the whip.
+
+Her grandmother she promptly christened "Tippy," also for a reason she
+could not or would not divulge. But one evening, to her secret
+amusement, Lilly found a sheet of paper in the litter of the desk,
+jotted all over with Zoe's joyous scrawl, "Zantippe," in every case the
+first syllable crossed out.
+
+All but Albert. She addressed him quite studiedly, "Father," her teeth
+coming down in a little bite over her lower lip, her use of the term
+never failing to elicit the rush of red to his ears.
+
+He seemed tranced, falling into all plans, just so they included the
+presence of his mother-in-law, without comment. To her proverbial apron
+strings he kept firm hold, literally not permitting her out of his
+sight. Even when he addressed Lilly or his daughter his gaze was
+straight for Mrs. Becker, and the flags of her moral support that he
+must have had the eyes to see waving for him in her glance.
+
+The impending interview began to take on the proportions of a delayed
+tooth-pulling. Repeatedly Lilly had cleared the way for it; just as
+repeatedly he had fled to cover. A week passed.
+
+Meanwhile something disquieting happened. It developed in further
+correspondence from Washington on the matter of canteen equipment, that
+there was some thought of sending Albert to France. An increased
+stolidity was his sole reaction, but there was no doubt that the
+prospect of an impending ocean trip weighed heavily.
+
+The submarine situation, at a time when the seas were sown with the
+menace of sudden death, was of greatest and worrying concern to him.
+
+No new device was overlooked. His room at the hotel was littered with
+rubber suits, guaranteed to keep the body floating upright for thirteen
+hours. Adjustable cork life savers. Patent propellers. Wings.
+
+There was talk, in the face of the impending contingency, of applying
+for a commission. Albert in olive drab! To Lilly he would not conjure.
+
+But meanwhile, to the slow champings of a huge governmental machine in
+travail, there was little to do but wait, and in the interim not a day
+that he and Mrs. Becker failed to follow up this or that newest device
+against bone-cracking seas.
+
+"Albert, there must be a way out! Don't tell me there are not plenty of
+men who could help install canteen service. Let them send Vincent
+Bankhead. He's younger. You leave it to me if they decide to send you.
+I'll find you a way out. It's done every day."
+
+"Wait until I'm called, mother; then there's time to act."
+
+But his eyes were worried.
+
+One day when the strain of holding together the precarious threads of
+the situation was becoming almost more than she could bear, and the end
+of the ten-day vacation period she was allowing herself from the office
+was at hand, Lilly spread three matinee tickets out on the table of a
+tea room where the five of them were lunching.
+
+"Zoe, you and your grandparents are going to the Hippodrome this
+afternoon. Albert and I will take a walk or a drive and meet you at the
+hotel afterward."
+
+"Mother, you come, too."
+
+"No, Albert, Lilly's right. I want this thing settled. I want something
+decided or I'll go mad. My husband has got me muzzled; I'm afraid to
+open my mouth; but if I don't know something soon, I'll go crazy. Why
+are we here? When are we all going back? I don't like it here. I can't
+stand the noise. My servant girl is out there eating me out of house and
+home. I didn't even lock the grocery closet; that is the state of
+excitement I left home in. Something has got to be settled. The minute I
+open my mouth to talk about what is in the back of all our heads,
+everybody shushes me up. Now you two go and talk it out. I want to go
+home. I want us all to go home. I'm a wreck. I--"
+
+"Carrie--"
+
+"Oh, I'll shut up! Next time you travel with me, get me a muzzle. All
+I'm good for is to bear the brunt of everything. You've dribbled my head
+full of enough these last seventeen years to drive any woman but me
+crazy. But with her, it's a soft mouth. I'll shut up, but for God's sake
+settle things. I'm going crazy. I can't stand it."
+
+The look of one trapped settled over Albert,
+
+"I think I'd rather walk," he said; "those cabs are reckless and the
+meters run up so."
+
+"Don't curl up your lips so, Lilly, over a little economy. Albert's
+right. What good does it do you to earn, the way you spend? Your husband
+has forty thousand dollars to show, and what have you to show? Taxicab
+rides don't draw any interest. Don't be so ready to curl up your lips."
+
+"Why, mamma, you imagine things!" And to Albert, "Of course, let's
+walk."
+
+For two hours, then, oftentimes stopping to face each other, they paced
+the wind-swept rectangle of the reservoir in Central Park, spring out in
+the air, but quite a tear of breeze across their high place.
+
+He was sullen, casuistic, and impenetrable as a sea wall under a
+dashing, and the thought came to her that had he presented any other
+surface it would have been easier.
+
+"Well, Albert," she began, facing him there in the wide afternoon light,
+"what is there that we two can say to each other?"
+
+"Words," he said, stodgy in his bitterness, "mean nothing against
+seventeen years."
+
+"You're right. And yet--I want you to know, Albert--before you go
+across--"
+
+"Don't be too sure you'll be rid of me that way."
+
+"Or before you go back home--that she is yours as much as mine and--"
+
+"Generous," he said, dryly.
+
+She could have beaten her head with a sense of futility.
+
+"You've been a bad woman with a streak of devil in you. Tried to ruin my
+life, but I didn't let you. No, siree! I've worked things out. I've
+gotten on. I'm big in my way--in my business--in my home."
+
+"Albert, I love to hear you say that!"
+
+"You! You don't love anything or anybody outside yourself."
+
+"Why? Because I took my chance to save myself from everything I--I
+hated! Not you--not they--but everything it stands for out there. Does
+self-preservation imply only selfishness?"
+
+"Whatever it implies," he answered, stung to dark red by his effort for
+quick retort, "you're selfish--rotten selfish. But you haven't kept me
+down. I've gotten up these eighteen years--and you--you--Bah!"
+
+"You've been happy, Albert? Tell me you have."
+
+"Happy! I'm not a hog for happiness. You to inquire about my happiness!
+Lots you care! I've had my share of contentment. Contented as a man can
+be in a community where he has kept up a farce for seventeen years that
+his wife is off with his consent studying opera. But I've kept my
+name--kept it in spite of you. I don't know what's been what with you.
+Guess if the truth is known, I'm afraid to think what's what!"
+
+"Albert--"
+
+"Oh, I don't put anything past you. I don't even know if that girl is
+mine. For all I know you're a--"
+
+"Albert!"
+
+"Bah! I don't put anything past you!"
+
+She faced his words as if they were blows, letting them rain.
+
+"You're lying, Albert," she said, evenly. "She's yours and you know it."
+
+"I've kept _my_ name! Kept it and tried to make it up to your parents,
+who deserved better than you!"
+
+She quivered and the red that sprang out in her face was almost purple,
+and yet by her silence bared her chest for more, as if grateful for the
+sting of the lash.
+
+"Bah! Don't be afraid. I don't want to know anything, but I'm not the
+booby I may seem to you. When a woman has lived around this way for all
+these years, in with a gang of show folks--Bah! I don't want to
+know." And spat.
+
+"She's yours, Albert, and you know it. You know it!"
+
+"Yes, I guess she is, from the look of her, not that I put anything past
+you. But that's your business. You're nothing to me. I'm cured of you.
+You couldn't make me suffer the way they do in books. I've kept my name,
+so if it's divorce you have on your brain, you might as well get it out,
+because--"
+
+"No, Albert--"
+
+"I've kept my name, whatever you've done to yours. Your life is your
+business. But the girl. That's where I have a right or two coming
+to me."
+
+She was prepared for just this, but somehow when it came it was a full
+moment before she could answer, for the rush of fear that choked her.
+
+"That's for--for Zoe to decide."
+
+"That's for _me_ to decide. She goes to a decent, respectable home where
+she belongs. You're not fit to raise her. Look at what you made of her.
+A fine specimen. A short-haired freak with all your crazy ideas thriving
+in her head. You've ruined your life, but you didn't succeed in ruining
+mine and you won't ruin hers. You and your stage-struck notions that
+never got you anywhere. She's going home where she belongs!"
+
+She could hardly breathe for keeping down the rising tide of her terror,
+but her eyes were always cold for him.
+
+"Your daughter has a lyric-soprano voice, and however little that may
+mean to you she is going to delight the world with it some day. One of
+the great masters of the world has made her his protegee. She is
+preparing for her audition--her hearing--in the fall, and it is even
+possible she may be singing in grand opera next season. You cannot--"
+
+"I'll see her dead first. You were an opera bird, too. I'll see her dead
+first before I let her make a zero mark out of her life as her crazy
+mother did before her."
+
+"Albert, can't you see! Zoe's the wine. You, mamma--papa--the vine. I
+don't count. I--I'm sort of the grape--that fermented--you see! She's
+me--plus. Her arm is long enough to touch what she wants. Mine wasn't. I
+saw it, but I couldn't reach. I was one generation too underdone. You
+cannot have Zoe. I cannot. She doesn't belong to you or me. She belongs
+to life. She's not mine. She is only my success; she--"
+
+"She--goes--home!"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Why in God's name did you get me on here? You don't expect to see me
+stand by and countenance your craziness?"
+
+"Why! Why! I've asked it ever since the moment I sent the wire. Why! I
+had to do it somehow--a fear of--something--war--life--death--but you
+shall not have her. Not unless she decides it that way. No. Never!"
+
+"I'm a slow thinker! And slower to act. That's been my trouble. But this
+time the bit is between my teeth. I've a family now and family
+obligations. Don't be so sure yet that I'm on my way overseas. There is
+a way around every situation if you look for it hard enough. My place is
+here now. Home! My daughter goes home!"
+
+She could see in profile the heavy jaw clamp upward, and more and more
+that wooden stodginess became terrible to her. In a flash-back she could
+see those seventeen years of beefsteak suppers; his temples at-their
+trick of working. Seventeen years all cluttered up with bed casters,
+bathtub stoppers, and poultry wiring. That party back there at Flora's.
+The lotto and tiddledywinks tables laid out. Page Avenue on a summer's
+day with the venders hawking down it--ap-ples--twenty cents a
+peck--ap-ples. Zoe--caught!
+
+She closed over his wrists with a little predatory grip.
+
+"Albert, don't do that! Don't take her back. She'll claw you like a wild
+eagle in a cage--out there. She belongs to the world. In the fall she
+sings for Auchinloss. It may lead to anything! Albert--you ask why I
+sent for you. Let her be. Let her stay here with Mrs. Blair--a friend--a
+dear--good friend of mine. Her education--Take me, Albert. Take _me_
+home--Albert."
+
+At her hand on his wrist something raced over him like the lick of a
+flame; he pressed against her with the entire length of his body and his
+lips were moist.
+
+"Lilly," he said, very darkly red and trying to clasp her about the
+waist, "I'll take you! I oughtn't, but I will. Come back, Lilly, and
+make it up to me for all these years. Being near you makes me forget
+everything except that--you are near me. I've missed you all these
+years--I guess--but never so much as this minute. You've gotten so
+handsome with the years. Something--Come home, Lilly--make it up to me.
+Give me--your--your lips!"
+
+She kept retreating before the dark red and the moist lips which he wet
+more and more with his tongue.
+
+"Will you leave her be--then--Albert? Here?"
+
+"Lilly--your lips--give me."
+
+"Will you, Albert--leave her here--Zoe?"
+
+She could feel the scald of his breathing.
+
+"Yes--if you come."
+
+"You promise?"
+
+"Yes, Lilly. Your lips--let me."
+
+Suddenly he had her to him, there in the light darkness of the deserted
+square of reservoir, kissing her so that his mouth smeared over
+toward her ear.
+
+She was not quick enough entirely to avert her face, and in the embrace
+his Adam's apple was against her throat so that she could feel it beat,
+and with her nails biting into her palm to keep her from screaming, she
+was shrieking over and over to herself at his nearness: "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Albert did not sail.
+
+A certain depression seemed to settle over him the evening following,
+after they had dined at a Broadway restaurant and were spending the
+interim before theater in the lobby of the Hotel Astor, where Mrs.
+Becker never tired of observing and commenting upon the transient swirl
+and peacockery.
+
+"Look at that tight skirt, will you! It's a shame for any
+self-respecting woman to have to look at, much less wear it."
+
+"Tippy dear, not so loud."
+
+"Look at that low-cut back, will you! And white hair, too. I wouldn't
+live in this town if you gave it to me! Sixty cents for string beans the
+menu read to-night. I can buy a bushel at home for that. If I had been
+alone I know what I would have done. Walked out. It's only for
+millionaires here. The rest have to live in back rooms so they can put
+everything on their backs. You should thank your stars you have a home
+to go to, Lilly, instead of you and Zoe crying over each other all day.
+If I had my say she would go, too. Education! St. Louis education is
+good enough for anybody. Ben, I want you to look! If I was to ask you to
+buy me a chiffon cape like that you would drop in your tracks."
+
+"Now, old lady, do I ever refuse you anything?"
+
+"No, because I never ask for anything."
+
+"I think we had better be going," said Lilly, leaning forward to tilt
+Zoe's hat farther down over her face. "I don't want you to miss the
+first act."
+
+There was to be a box for "Who Did It?" and a visit behind scenes
+between acts.
+
+"I want to get a look-in on what goes on behind there," specified Mrs.
+Becker through a sniff. "Fine mess!"
+
+From where he sat with crossed knees and his nicely polished shoes far
+out so that passers-by were forced to a small detour, Albert looked
+suddenly across at his mother-in-law, rather scaredly white.
+
+"Mother," he said, "I've got a pain in my chest."
+
+On the instant her rosiness blanched.
+
+"Albert, one of your colds coming on? They never start on your chest.
+It's influenza; the papers are full of it. They say next winter we're
+going to have it in a terrible epidemic. Albert, what hurts?"
+
+He inserted two fingers into the front pleat of his shirt.
+
+"It hurts here," he said.
+
+"Albert," cried Mrs. Becker, instantly taken with panic, "let me feel if
+you have any fever!"
+
+"Now, now, Carrie, don't create a scene here in the lobby. You've nursed
+him through enough colds not to be alarmed."
+
+"But, Ben, in his chest! It's a symptom, I tell you; the papers are full
+of it!"
+
+"Nonsense, Carrie! It's probably a little indigestion. You will insist
+upon those table d'hotes. On the way to the theater we'll stop in at a
+drug store."
+
+"Theater! Don't even mention the word. Come upstairs, Albert. Luckily I
+put a pair of your flannelette pajamas in the trunk. Ben, you rush over
+to the drug store for some camphorated oil. Albert, do you feel achy?"
+
+Lilly laid out a quietly firm hand on his arm.
+
+"Mamma, please let Albert get a word in."
+
+"I know that boy like a book. He looks feverish."
+
+"Albert," said Lilly, holding to the sedative quality in her voice, "do
+you feel ill?"
+
+"I've a pain in my chest," he persisted, doggedly and with the drawn
+look about his mouth whitening.
+
+They put him to bed. By nine o'clock a slight flush lay on Albert's
+cheek and he kept feeling of his brow.
+
+"I think I have fever," he said once, always in scared white manner.
+"Look in the paper and see if dry lips is one of the symptoms."
+
+Then Zoe was dispatched home and the house physician called in, Mrs.
+Becker, as usual, tempestuous with instantaneous hysteria and conjuring
+to Lilly another sick room from out the hinterland of her childhood.
+
+"Doctor, is it the Spanish influenza? Has he fever? He's always subject
+to colds, Doctor. He's not as strong as he looks. I've sat up many a
+night with his quincy sore throats. Many is the time, before we got the
+auto, that I rode down for him in the street car with his rubbers, if a
+rain came up. Doctor, do you think it could be that Spanish influenza? O
+God! if he should take sick away from home! Our doctor at home
+understands his system. My boy--my son--"
+
+With a frozen sense of her alienism, Lilly sat, as it were, outside the
+situation, proffering herself almost with a sense of intrusion.
+
+The doctor would not pronounce, but left with instructions and the
+promise of a midnight return. Into that Mrs. Becker read darkly.
+
+"He's a sick man or one of these busy New York doctors wouldn't be
+returning again to-night. My boy is a sick man."
+
+Meanwhile Albert had fallen into a light sleep. They sat beside his
+bedside watching his lips puff out, sometimes in bubbles.
+
+The silence of midnight descended over the transient formality of the
+hotel room.
+
+Undoubtedly Albert had a fever which seemed to be rising. He moistened
+his lips now constantly and threw himself about beneath the coverings,
+and then Mrs. Becker, not to be restrained, would lean forward to brush
+backward from his brow, as if there were hair.
+
+At midnight the doctor returned and at one o'clock Albert was removed to
+Murray Hill Hospital.
+
+He was ill three days, slipping off almost from the beginning into a
+state of coma from which he did not emerge.
+
+With a celerity that was presently to race it through the country, this
+strange malady laid low its victim with what might have been pneumonia,
+except for certain complications that baffled and alarmed an already
+thoroughly aroused medical world.
+
+The second day a sort of dark rash broke out over Albert's chest, so
+that his nurses entered the room in gauze masks, and finally, in spite
+of Lilly's protestations and Mrs. Becker's most violent hysterics, no
+admittance to the sick room was granted them.
+
+And now comes a tide in the affairs of Lilly Penny which, being too true
+life, is not sufficiently true to fiction.
+
+On the day that was to have been Zoe's formal graduation from High
+School, so that the pearl-embroidered slippers were never worn and her
+diploma brought home to her by a classmate, Albert Penny died, with no
+more furor than he had lived.
+
+Stupor enveloped Lilly. She moved through days incredibly crowded with
+detail, and yet, somehow, so withdrawn into the very nub of herself that
+it was the shell of her seemed to compete with the passing time.
+Certainly it was this shell of her followed Albert in that strangest of
+little processions, to his cremation.
+
+There had been an effort to travel west with the remains, but quarantine
+conditions forbade, and it was just as well so.
+
+Four times on that ride through a warm summer rain to the crematory Mrs.
+Becker went off into light faints, sobbing herself back into
+consciousness. It frightened Lilly to look at her father; his face had
+dropped into hollows and the roundness of his back was suddenly a
+decided hump. And he had fallen into a silence. A sort of hollow urn of
+it that not even the outbursts of his wife could rouse to his usual
+soothing chirpings. He merely sat stroking her hand and staring into a
+silence which he seemed to see.
+
+A very quiet and very frightened Zoe had been packed off to Ida Blair's,
+through it all Lilly's stupor persisting.
+
+Mrs. Becker's state became cause for concern. Once back at the hotel,
+with Albert's room locked off, and once more thrown open to the
+impersonal feet of transiency, she would only moan and wind her hands
+and go off into the light states of unconsciousness.
+
+"I haven't my son any more! Why did we come? It might not have happened
+at home. Our daughter wronged him, but, thank God, we tried to make it
+up to him. My boy. He was so steady--so careful. I can't realize he's
+gone--without me. The way he used to come home. Never a habit--evening
+after evening his newspaper and bed. Thank God, I don't think he ever
+missed her going as he might have. It hurt at first. He wanted to resign
+his Bible class, and that day we broke up the house--he kept twitching
+with his eyes. You remember, Ben. And that bed caster. Funny to have
+twitched over that. It seems he brought it home the night she left--it
+came over him all of a sudden, it wouldn't ever have to be fitted in.
+That's it! O God! all these years without knowing his own child. He was
+so steady--a good boy if God ever grew one. Ben, Ben, how can we go home
+without him? How can we go home without our boy?"
+
+"Carrie, it is God's will."
+
+"It is nobody's will. God couldn't will it that way. Just as he had got
+a little happiness in his way. To think he was willing to take her back.
+I don't care for myself, we're on in years, Ben--we're done--and now
+we've lost our--all--nothing to live for--"
+
+"Mamma, mamma, don't talk that way. Let me try to make up to you for--"
+
+"I can't face going home. He was my life, that boy. He made up for what
+we suffered through our own. He was a son to us. I can't face going home
+without him. Albert--where are you? Albert!"
+
+"Mamma, mamma, won't you let me try to make up, dear, for what I have
+failed you?"
+
+"Albert--can't you hear me--Albert--"
+
+"Carrie, we've got our daughter back. Isn't that something to be--"
+
+"I want my son, I tell you."
+
+"Mamma darling, you're killing me. Let me make it up to you--even a
+little--the--"
+
+"No, no; you're not a daughter to me. I want my son. Our way was his
+way."
+
+"Mamma, please--take me home in his place. I'll make it up to you. Let
+me go back, dear, in Albert's place. I want to pay up--to you. I'm
+finished--here, dear. I'm ready--ready--"
+
+Suddenly Mrs. Becker seemed to experience one of her cyclonic shifts.
+Tears came raining down her face, her sobbing cleft with great racking
+gulps. Then she dropped to her knees beside her daughter, and, before
+Lilly could prevent, reached up to drag down her face against her own
+tear-drenched one.
+
+"Don't leave us, Lilly. Don't ever. Come home with us. We're getting
+old, Lilly. Don't ever leave us, me and papa. Promise me,
+Lilly. Promise."
+
+"Of course I promise, mamma darling. Of course I promise."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+For a full week after Albert's strangely curtailed obsequies, a gray
+blanket of woolly humidity hung with July unseemliness over the city in
+a clinging fog that feathered the throat.
+
+The morning that Lilly returned to the office electric lights were
+burning and electric fans were whirring into it.
+
+The unassailed normality of the machine whose functioning depended upon
+its parts! How easily even the most component of those parts could be
+replaced! The rows of stenographers, in her but two weeks' absence, new
+faces among them, outlined against windows of space and East River. The
+hinged little mahogany gates swinging to their goings and comings. Her
+own office with its glazed pane of door glass and outlook over city
+roofs and tug-specked band of river.
+
+It was as if the tide of life were once more licking at her feet. She
+hung up her hat, patting at her hair in the little square of mirror
+above the stationary washstand, looking back at herself out of eyes a
+bit dreggy with tiredness, but her skin so deep in its whiteness that it
+was almost as if its creamy quality had congealed of mere richness.
+
+She rubbed her cheeks to pinken and quicken them, and rang for an office
+boy, turning her back on the pile of letters and her reports on the desk
+and her eagerness to be at them.
+
+"Ask Mr. Bruce Visigoth if he can see me."
+
+The message came back on the instant. He could.
+
+She turned the knob to his office door so slowly that she saved the
+slightest squeak, and stood there with her silhouette against the ground
+glass for a long moment. When she did enter, from the center of the room
+where he had been watching her silhouette against the pane, Bruce
+advanced to meet her.
+
+He took her hand and on the instant she felt her eyes fill, burningly.
+
+He was in summer and office negligee, an unlined blue-serge coat, a
+white-silk shirt which lay lightly to his body flexuosity, and above the
+soft collar he had taken on enough outdoor tan to make his smile whiter.
+She could have bitten her lips for their trembling, and tried to smile
+with her tortured eyes.
+
+"Lilly," he said, topping her hand with his, "why didn't you let me know
+sooner? Your letter an hour ago came out of a clear sky. You see, I
+didn't even know he--he was here."
+
+"It was all so--so quick!"
+
+"Jove! I don't seem to take it in yet."
+
+"Nor I," she said, quiescently and letting him lead her to a chair.
+"He--You see, he was only ill three days."
+
+"There doesn't seem much for me to say, does there, Lilly?"
+
+"No," she said, "that's it, there's nothing to say."
+
+"I can't bear to think of your having been exposed to it."
+
+"That was the least. He died--afraid. That is so terrible to me,
+somehow. I wouldn't mind all of the horrible rest if only he hadn't
+died--afraid. I wonder if you know what I mean. He lived so--so meekly
+to have died--that way. Afraid."
+
+"Yes," he said, "I think I do know." He wanted to keep his gaze away
+from her and to keep it cool, but somehow each time their eyes met a
+flame leaped up out of embers, a fiery new consciousness that
+kept dancing.
+
+"He and--and my parents--you see, they--Well, I told you everything in
+the letter."
+
+"Are your parents returning home?"
+
+"Yes. That's what I've come to say. You see--they--we--we've decided to
+remain here two months. Until September--up in my little apartment, all
+of us. In September Zoe is to have her audition with Auchinloss. So much
+depends on that. We've such hopes, her teacher and I. She's pure lyric
+soprano. We think grand-opera brand. And now with the war on, more and
+more the American girl is getting her chance. That's why my parents have
+finally consented to wait here with me until then. After that, Zoe is to
+stay with Ida Blair and we three--my parents and I--are going
+home--together. That is what I have come to tell you. I'll be giving up
+my work with you in--September. I'm going home--with them."
+
+He regarded her, his flush going down perceptibly.
+
+"You're fooling."
+
+"No," she said, trying to smile. "I suppose it's about the most solemn
+job I have left to do in life--going home."
+
+"Why, you--you can't go back there."
+
+"I can," she said, her voice held calm.
+
+"I--we can't let you go."
+
+"Why? Zoe--my big job's done."
+
+"Lilly, I tell you we need you here more than ever. My brother arrives
+this morning from Seattle. We've completed the cross-country chain. I'm
+free now to branch out. I'm counting on you. I'm full of an idea for
+that community opera scheme and I'm ready to do the play from the
+Russian on your say-so. Lilly--you cannot go now--"
+
+"I can--must," she said, scraping back her chair. "You must work out your
+dreams--alone--with some one else. I--must--go." And then withdrawing
+from what she saw: "No! No! Bruce! No! No!"
+
+But just the same they were in each other's arms with the
+irresistibility of tide for moon and moon for tide. Press him back with
+her palms as she would when his lips found hers, it was as if something
+etheric had flowed into her brain. She wanted to resist him and instead
+her hands met in a clasp about his neck. "No, no." And yet as he kissed
+her eyelids and down against the satinness of her hair, it seemed to her
+that toward this moment all the poor blind years had been directed.
+
+"Lilly--darling."
+
+She tried to shake off her enchantment.
+
+"You hurt!"
+
+"I want to."
+
+"My--love."
+
+"My love."
+
+"So this--this is it?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Love."
+
+"Love. Love."
+
+"How beautiful--sex."
+
+"I want to kiss those stars out of your eyes. I want to wind you in
+moonlight."
+
+"Bruce, I think I must be mad. Crazily--deliciously mad."
+
+"Me too. I'm as deliciously, as crazily mad as any young Leander. I want
+to swim a thousand Hellesponts for you. I want--"
+
+"No--no--no, Bruce, you don't understand--my love--"
+
+"I do understand. That I have you now to love and adore, to marry--"
+
+The door opened then, quite abruptly. It was Robert Visigoth. He had a
+straw hat in one hand and an alligator traveling bag in the other. The
+latter he set down rather abruptly.
+
+So instantaneous was their springing apart and so ready the mind to
+believe what the heart denied, that it was almost conceivable that he
+had not seen. There was not even a pause, and through the perfunctory
+greetings of these two men of strangest relation, Lilly found herself
+somehow back at her desk, little prickles out all over her body and
+particularly against her face, like the bite of sleet, something like
+this running behind her lips:
+
+"Please, God, don't let him tell. He promised! Please! God, I'll never
+give in again. Bruce--my darling--don't let him tell you. He promised he
+wouldn't. Don't tell him, Robert. Bruce, don't let him. Please,
+God--don't let him."
+
+After a while, burning with the fever in her blood, she plunged, for the
+sedative of it, into the work before her. The first of a stack of
+reports on her desk was from the Adelphi Theater, Akron, Ohio.
+
+"Three Melodious Sisters." 12 minutes. Well received. Wardrobe worn.
+
+"Whistling Bicyclers."     14 minutes. Skillful. Comedy weak.
+
+"Please, God--don't let him--"
+
+"Shenck and Bent."          9 minutes. 3 laughs.
+
+"Sylvia King & Co." 9 minutes. Weak patter but finished strong.
+
+"Musical Gypsies."         10 minutes. Fair. Good opening number.
+
+"Please, God, don't let him tell."
+
+After what might have been minutes or hours, then, the door opened and
+without preamble Robert Visigoth walked in, and in the wide-kneed
+fashion forced upon him by corpulency seated himself beside her desk.
+
+"How long has this thing been going on?" he said, looking at her from
+under beetling brows that had grown bushy with the years. Time had done
+just that to Robert Visigoth. Beetled him. His years overhung him. He
+carried them massively. It was not so much that he had lost his
+waistline, but he had settled into himself. That was it! Robert Visigoth
+had settled rather appallingly into himself.
+
+For a second Lilly's eyes moved from the two fifty-cent cigars
+protruding from his waistcoat pocket to a lodge button at his lapel, and
+then, finally trapped, met his.
+
+"How long? I said."
+
+"You've told him?" she asked, leaning forward to hear through the
+buzzing in her ears.
+
+"Whether I do or not depends upon you."
+
+She tried not to let him see how the room was rocking around and around,
+how suddenly the buzzing had lifted until she felt light-headed. She
+could have shouted, danced, wept, or fainted her relief. Nothing
+mattered, not even the squatty person sitting there with little diabetic
+puffs beneath his eyes.
+
+"How long has this thing been going on?" he repeated, his voice a rising
+gale.
+
+"Are you your brother's keeper?"
+
+"From your kind, yes."
+
+"There has been nothing between us."
+
+"That's a lie."
+
+Through the scorch of her humiliation it was a second before she could
+command her lips.
+
+"I swear to God."
+
+"Bah!" he almost spat out, "after what I walked in on!"
+
+"Yes," she said, biting off the words with a clip, "after what you
+walked in on."
+
+He leaned forward with a thrust of face that was unpleasantly close.
+
+"All I have to say is, hands off there."
+
+"There has been nothing between us. I tell you it's true."
+
+"I'm not concerned whether it is or not. What has been has been. But
+now, hands off. You can't land my brother. I heard the word. Marry. The
+cheek--you--my brother! You must be crazy."
+
+"You're wrong. You're wrong," she managed to insist, her throat rising
+and falling like a sea.
+
+"My eyes aren't wrong. They saw what I stumbled in on."
+
+"I know. I know. It's difficult--impossible to explain away an--an
+occurrence like that. How well I know the futility of trying to convince
+your kind of man that there are more than two kinds of women in the
+world. Good and bad. The woman you marry and the woman you ruin. I'm
+bad. Have it your way. Bad. Bad. Bad. But for what was your sin as much
+as mine you are free in your man-made society to go your way, fulfilling
+your life, and then you dare to come here and sit judgment on my
+fulfilling mine. When are women going to venture from _behind_ the
+man-made throne to sit beside, and make you men move over?"
+
+"I'm not here to discuss the double code with you. I don't know and
+don't care how you have lived since. It is not my business. For sixteen
+years you have given this firm fine satisfaction for which we, in turn,
+have tried to express our appreciation. You know that. We know that.
+Your morals are none of my business except when they touch me! A man's a
+man. I don't know how you've lived. For my part, I think you've gone
+pretty straight, but that doesn't change matters. I know what I know,
+and a man's a man. What are you going to do about it? You know, too,
+that there is no love lost between me and my brother in the little
+things. We go our ways. But when it comes to the big--he's my brother.
+Blood. Get me? Whatever I am can't change me here inside. He's my
+brother. You're--you!"
+
+"You're right. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I must have been mad--this
+morning. I--somehow--it got all beyond me in a moment. I swear to you
+for the first time! Do you think I'd muss up one hour of his life? Even
+if I dared? Even if you were to come to me, on your knees, begging me
+to--to--marry him? To begin with, I'm older--only a year in time, it's
+true, but he--he's just beginning. I'm beginning over. What is my life
+compared to his? He's on the brink of a thousand realizations. And
+I--oh, I'm not whining. I'd do it all over again, loathing you as you
+must know I loathed you--that night. But my child got her chance. You
+sold it to me and I paid for it in the basest coin of the realm. But I'd
+do it again--knowing what I know now, I'd do it again. You hear! Do
+you hear!"
+
+"That's past now--"
+
+"No. For you, yes, but I'm still paying. Paying at this moment with
+my--my heart's blood. But if I hadn't done it--gone with you--something
+would have been lost that night that was worth every cent I paid.
+They'd have got her back. I don't care. I've won. I've won if
+I've lost."
+
+She was on her feet now, her eyes, like blue wells that were filling
+with ink, plunging beyond his with a Testament defiance that seemed to
+shout, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
+
+"Yes, I love him. You can't take that from me. That is why he is so safe
+from me. I love him too much for him to know. And yet I think--I
+believe--I know that even if he did know, in the end it
+wouldn't matter--"
+
+"You must be crazy. Once let your idealist wake up and there is no more
+dreaming for him."
+
+"He mustn't ever wake up--for his sake! Promise. Promise me that you
+won't ever wake him!"
+
+"Whether I do or not is up to you."
+
+"What do you want?" she said, tiredly.
+
+"I suppose the black and white of it is that you must quit."
+
+"That is easy. I'm resigning anyway the fifteenth of September to go
+West to live."
+
+He took on the half-conciliatory graciousness of one who has gained his
+advantage with unsuspected ease.
+
+"I'd give a great deal not to have had this happen, but, after all, a
+man is a man and life is life."
+
+She let her gaze bore into his like gimlets burning for center.
+
+"I think you've explained that before."
+
+He began to back out before her immobility.
+
+"I am remaining East two months. I hope your resignation will allow us
+that much time to attempt to fill your place."
+
+"I leave that to you. It can be either immediate or take effect in
+September."
+
+"By all means the latter. Will you--can you believe me when I say if
+there is anything I can do--letters--an opening with a Western firm--"
+
+"Please," she said, turning him a shoulder in high distaste.
+
+"I have your word--then?"
+
+"My word," she said, looking past his hand toward the door.
+
+He backed out in the somewhat ludicrous crab fashion and then she sat
+down, swinging around on her swivel chair toward the desk. The stack of
+reports lay facing her. She caught up the next in order.
+
+People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma.
+
+For the next half hour she must have sat there trying to co-ordinate out
+of chaos by staring at the heading and repeating over and over again:
+"_People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,
+Oklahoma._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whistles were blasting through the noonday fog when Bruce finally and
+without preamble burst into her office.
+
+It struck her even on the gale of his entrance how young he was that his
+hair should show the nervous plowing of five fingers, and how sensitive
+his profile and ready to flare at the nostrils. His tie, too, burnt
+orange, from a soft collar and badly knotted! She wanted to jerk up his
+chin and putter at remaking the four-in-hand.
+
+"Lilly--sweetheart--"
+
+She sat regarding him over the top of People's Playhouse, Tulsa,
+Oklahoma.
+
+"Sweetheart, let us call it a day. I want to drive you out to Tarrytown
+to--"
+
+"Don't," she said, frowning.
+
+"Don't what?" Her immobility an ineffectual stop to his exuberance.
+
+"Come now," wanting to draw her from her chair by the two hands,
+swinging them wide and then together; "don't let his nibs bouncing in
+that way throw a damper. We were too quick for him, anyway. Don't
+believe he saw a thing. And what if he did? He's going to know it
+anyhow, and pretty quick, too. I want to shout it from the housetops, I
+want to megaphone it up to the stars. Lilly--Lilly-mine! Sweetheart!"
+
+She crowded back into the chair.
+
+"How dared you!"
+
+He fell back with his gesture still wide.
+
+"Why--what? Dared what? Oh, come now, sweetheart, I could wager he
+didn't see, and suppose he did? We've nothing to conceal. I'm for
+telling him to-day!"
+
+"No. No. No. You played unfair. You took me--unawares. You misunderstood
+me horribly--most horribly."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"Why, you--you _boy!_ What has happened cannot make any difference
+between you and me. It was outrageous of you--silly _boy_ you--to--to
+take advantage. After all that has passed--all these years--it is
+unthinkable that you didn't understand. Why, you--you _boy!_"
+
+She saw his jaw fall and the sense of his ridiculousness set in.
+
+"What has merely been absurd all along you have suddenly made
+intolerant. You make more imperative my resignation. You must
+understand--Mr. Visigoth--under what conditions I will consent to remain
+here these few weeks."
+
+The words were so stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal
+disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could
+see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he
+had been slapped.
+
+"Lilly, for God's sake, you--you cannot be serious!"
+
+"No mock heroics--please."
+
+His ears tipped with flame; he straightened back from her.
+
+"No more mock heroics," he said, in a voice suddenly quieted down like
+vichy gone stale. "Forgive an old--fool--a young--fool--and forget it.
+Thank you for jerking me up."
+
+He raised her limp hand, bowing over it until his lips hovered but did
+not touch.
+
+"My solemn word on it this time--no more--mock--heroics." And still
+Lilly, on the click of the door after him, could not clear her brain of
+the running threnody of nonsense:
+
+People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,
+Oklahoma.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the
+days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors
+and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an
+interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly
+there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact,
+when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to
+a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk
+ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her in
+Ida Blair's Long Island bungalow.
+
+They were a group diverse of emotion and perilous to one another's
+nerves this last morning.
+
+MRS. BECKER: "I think I'd better write my girl another postal to be sure
+and have supper ready when we get home Thursday night. There is some
+canned salmon in the grocery closet, I forgot to mention, and she can
+borrow a few potatoes from the Shriners for frying, until I get a chance
+to lay in supplies when I get home. Poor Albert! How he loved creamed
+salmon and fried potatoes! Ben, help me to realize what has happened.
+O God, I--"
+
+MR. BECKER: "Now, Carrie."
+
+MRS. BECKER: "The Shriners are nice neighbors, Lilly. They are the only
+ones besides us on the block who stuck after the street began to go
+down. You'll like Edna Shriner. You remember her? Pock-marked. She used
+to be in your dancing-school class. She never married, but how she keeps
+that little home for her old father! Kitchen floor! You could eat off
+it. And as handy a body with the needle as ever lived. Her French knots.
+The guest-towels that girl has French-knotted."
+
+LILLY (to herself): "Salmon and fried potatoes. Page Avenue. Shriners.
+Funny!--O God!--Why--Oh!--Oh!--Funny!--"
+
+ZOE: "Lilly, feel my heart, how it beats."
+
+It was as if Lilly could not take her eyes from off her daughter.
+
+"Remember what Triest said, dearest, let your nerves be so many violin
+strings, tightening but not quivering."
+
+"It's your going, Lilly--I--I can't seem quite to grasp it. You will
+come back to me soon--in two months--one--I couldn't stand it longer!"
+
+"Yes, and, Zoe, you will write every day. Every little single thing.
+Your work--your life--your friends--every tiny success--"
+
+"Lilly, Lilly--don't go! It's madness. Stay, darling. I feel like a
+pig--all that money--his fortune. If you are not entitled to touch it,
+I am not--"
+
+"You are his child and the only wrong you ever did him was through me."
+
+"Lilly--don't go, darling--"
+
+"Zoe, don't tear me to pieces."
+
+"I'll work, darling, as I've never worked before."
+
+"Zoe, Zoe, go straight to your mark."
+
+"I--I can't realize it, Lilly. To-day! He's going to hear me
+to-day--this very afternoon. I--I feel as nervous at the prospect of
+singing before you as before him. I--I think I'm the luckiest girl in
+the world. Lilly, sometimes I--I--think life has--has sort of cleared
+the way for me to walk in its lovely places--you have cleared the way.
+But what--what if he doesn't think I've the voice _maestro_ thinks I
+have? I couldn't stand that, Lilly--the way you stood it."
+
+"But he will," said Lilly, a memory shaping itself. "Remember your power
+begins where mine left off. You heard Du Gass the year before she died,
+but you were too young to remember. Your voice is so much--so
+infinitely bigger, Zoe, and your knowledge and defiance of life and of
+the Auchinlosses--makes me so unafraid for you--"
+
+"Kiss me, Lilly. I'm frightened--not of Auchinloss--or life--but
+of--Oh, I don't know--frightened of silliness, I guess."
+
+"I'm not."
+
+"But you're trembling."
+
+"Of hope."
+
+At eleven Lilly went down to her office. Leon Greenberg already had her
+desk. It was largely a matter now of sliding in the new prop before
+sliding out the old.
+
+There were several farewell offerings from various of the older girls.
+The immemorial trifles that women exchange. A bottle of eau de cologne.
+The inevitable six handkerchiefs. A silver bodkin for running ribbon
+through lingerie. And from the booking department, a silk umbrella
+suitably engraved. She cried a little.
+
+By noon the top of her desk was bare and the drawers empty.
+
+She sat looking out over the waves of roofs of a city that had beaten
+her back at every turn, lashed her, and yet with the mysterious
+counterflow of oceans had carried her out a foot for every ten it
+flung her back.
+
+She felt full of sobs, but quiet. Strangely quiet, as if the champing
+machinery of her life had stopped suddenly, leaving an hiatus that made
+her heart ache of passivity.
+
+At two o'clock, by appointment, came Zoe ... like a blaze of light. Her
+eyes with her mother's trick of iris, full of inner glow, and her blond
+hair so daringly boxed, set off with a droop of tam-o'-shanter.
+
+There had been a new frock of heavy white crepe with a wide white hat
+for this occasion. Instead, with last-moment decision, she had come in
+one of the straight blue frocks, the wide patent-leather belt, a knot of
+orange and blue ribbon, representing her active membership in a local
+canteen service, at her throat. She came glowing through the daring
+simplicity, flamboyantly and to the nth power of Lilly's slower
+personality, her mother's child.
+
+"Hurry, darling, I've a taxi waiting. We're to meet _maestro_ at the
+Opera House."
+
+"Zoe, I'm glad you wore this instead. Did your grandmother feel badly
+that you didn't wear the one she gave you?"
+
+"I wasn't myself in it. No--room."
+
+In the corridor, going out, Bruce stepped suddenly out of his office
+into their path.
+
+Zoe's hand had shot out.
+
+"Hello, you!" she said.
+
+He looked at her through a slow smile.
+
+"Well, I'll be hanged! The youngster! Good Lord! What have they done!
+Who elongated you? Where are the knee dresses and the corkscrews?"
+
+She withdrew a highly haughty hand.
+
+"You poor, misguided Rip Van Winkle. When did you return from the
+Catskills?"
+
+"When did it happen?" he asked Lilly, trying to keep his eyes from
+crinkling.
+
+It was the first time in this last brace of weeks that there had been
+more than the merest perfunctory word between them, and she tried to
+thaw her cold lips into a smile.
+
+"You forget that you haven't seen her since last Christmas. Six inches
+more of skirt and a few hairpins did it."
+
+"Well, I'll be hanged!" he kept reiterating. "Zoe grown up!"
+
+"Is it true you are going to try for the aviation? Ida Blair says you
+are."
+
+"Looks that way."
+
+"You're too old."
+
+"Well, then, I'll have to come down to earth. You and your mother have
+different ideas regarding my age. I'm rather dizzy about it this minute,
+myself. Either time is putting one over on me or you have caught up. By
+Jove! that's it! You've caught up! You're immense!"
+
+She was suddenly, and to Lilly's amazement, a creature of flashes and
+quirks, of self and sex consciousness.
+
+"Don't like to be--immense!"
+
+"Gorgeous, then."
+
+"Better."
+
+"Don't go. Let me look at you."
+
+"Come with us. Dare you."
+
+"Zoe!"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I'm singing this afternoon for Auchinloss. My audition at the Opera
+House."
+
+"The deuce you say!"
+
+"I've a cab waiting," she said, challenging him with a flash of eyes to
+their corners.
+
+"Wait," he said, darting into his office.
+
+"Zoe, how dared you?"
+
+"Lilly--he's thrilling! I want him along; I feel keyed up now. The way I
+want to feel! Edgy!"
+
+Before her persistently cold lips would reply he rejoined them and
+presently they were all three in the cab.
+
+His contemplation of Zoe became a stare.
+
+"So the little Zoe grew up."
+
+"I'm eighteen. You used to be old enough to be my father. Not any more.
+Now you are old enough to be my--anything."
+
+"Zoe!"
+
+"Good Lord!" he said. "Fact."
+
+Suddenly her nervousness came flowing back over her.
+
+"Lilly, look at me every second while I'm singing, darling. You too,"
+leaning toward him and placing cold fingers on each of their wrists.
+
+"Delightful and easy task."
+
+She made him a _moue_, prettily pouty.
+
+"You'll be sorry, when I'm famous, that you didn't take me seriously."
+
+"How can I take you at all when you've taken me off my feet?"
+
+"You've never heard me sing, have you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Wait."
+
+"I palpitate."
+
+"I'm going to be all alone now, you know," she said, looking at him with
+her brilliant eyes filling.
+
+"More's the pity," he said, feeling rather than seeing the downward
+brush of Lilly's lashes.
+
+"I'll be out at Ida Blair's until--for a while."
+
+"May I come out and play with you, now that you are caught up and I can
+be your--anything?"
+
+"You may."
+
+Laughter.
+
+With the stopping of the cab such a javelin of nervousness shot through
+Lilly that it was as if it had pierced her heart.
+
+A lovely pallor was out over Zoe, enlarging the dark pools of her eyes.
+
+"Sit out in the house, center aisle, and look at me, dears--so I can
+feel you there--"
+
+To the magic of a bit of cardboard Lilly and Bruce were in the vast
+fantastic hinterland of the Opera House, and, stumbling through various
+degrees of blackness, were presently down in the colossal maw of the
+auditorium, finding out seats in the great pit of darkness.
+
+They sat in silence, except that for Lilly the beating of her heart
+seemed to record like a clapper against her brain.
+
+"Don't be nervous," he said once.
+
+"I'm not," she lied.
+
+There was a bunch light on the stage, a dirty backdrop of Corinthian
+pillars and esplanade and no wings, one or two stage hands moving about,
+and finally a concert grand piano dragged down.
+
+Suddenly Lilly recognized Auchinloss. He was standing just outside the
+pool of light that flowed over the piano, the unforgetable outline of
+his shaggy head, joined by two little peninsulas of sideburns to the
+heavy spade of beard, gray now and not the sooty black she remembered.
+
+The odor of that little room up on Amsterdam Avenue came winding back.
+Millie du Gass, the supreme soprano of two continents--dead now, of
+heartbreak, some said; Alma, in her plaid-silk waist and the
+bookkeeper's curve to her back. That walk across the parlor floor--
+
+"There's Auchinloss now," said Bruce.
+
+She did not reply, but sat with her handkerchief against her mouth and
+crowded breathing.
+
+There were three auditions.
+
+A high-bosomed young woman with a powerful mezzo soprano that pulled her
+mouth to a rhomboid sang Santuzza's famous aria from "Cavalleria
+Rusticana," stopping suddenly to some unseen signal.
+
+"Fine, strong voice of resonant tin," said Visigoth, under his breath.
+
+A throaty young tenor sang "Ride, Ride, Pagliacci," through to the sob,
+anticipating it with a violent throw of body.
+
+Then Trieste took the piano, running downward an avalanche of quick
+chords, the sepia-outlined head of Auchinloss gone meanwhile from the
+stage and down somewhere in the sea of dimness that rolled through the
+auditorium. Lilly could see his profile etched into the twilight.
+
+Very suddenly Zoe was downstage, and through the cymbals hitting into
+Lilly's consciousness the voice finally came through to her, flowing so
+easily on the beautiful, the tried old theme of Michaela's aria that she
+had the feeling of great bolts of every color ribbon, winding about and
+not even half un-flung as they struck the topmost places.
+
+How true her flight!
+
+With each fluty mount how like a bird, the line of her throat, as her
+chin went up, throbbing slightly of its warbling, and from where she
+stood her gaze seeming to plumb them out.
+
+She sang through without interruption, so that when she had finished,
+the timbre lay like a singing wire on the silence.
+
+Somewhere between the ecstasy of the elbow that pressed against hers,
+and the ecstasy of her child's voice still trilling on the black
+silence, Lilly was conscious of movement. The gray silhouette marching
+down the aisle of gloom. A group up about the piano. Another chord
+struck out. Zoe's voice skipping upward in grace notes.
+
+Vague, indeterminate passings of figures through a fluid of unreality,
+like submarine life behind glass.
+
+Then somehow they were out again into the gloom of wings and then on to
+the white, incredible humdrum of the side street, standing there beside
+the little door marked "Private," Bruce at her side, rather quivery at
+the flanges and mopping constantly at the damp rim of his hair.
+
+"Lilly, you've won!"
+
+She felt sillily inclined to laugh.
+
+"I seem to have, don't I?" she said, turning her face under pretense of
+adjusting her hat, but really for fear that even a smile would induce
+the threatening laughter which she knew, once let go, would slip up
+beyond her control.
+
+"She's a flute. She's a lark. She's a dream. I--I don't believe I seem
+to take it in."
+
+"Nor--I."
+
+Later, Zoe joined them, an air of assumed composure belied by the
+flaming brilliancy of her eyes and cheeks.
+
+"Why didn't you come up afterward?" she said, forcing a commonplace,
+and to Bruce, "Hail a cab, Pretty-please."
+
+He did, helping them in and poking his head in after.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Anywhere. Let it be the Park for a while, Lilly?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Is three a crowd?"
+
+For answer she drew him in by the sleeve and on the jouncing off of the
+cab was in her mother's arms, covering her cheeks with close-pressed,
+audible kisses, and, after the inexplicable manner of women, both of
+them crying.
+
+"He--he didn't say much, Lilly. Kissed my hands. Told me to live
+beautifully and work endlessly. Asked me if I loved poetry and painting
+and sunrises and spring--a lot of stuff about the awakening of spring.
+And kissed my hands again. I'm going back to-morrow. They're discussing
+things now--he and _maestro_--something about a five-year contract--but
+a great deal of red tape first--board meeting. I'm to be a secret until
+next season, _maestro_ cried--and Auchinloss--Lilly, you need never be
+afraid for me--you hear--you hear--never! We measured each other--he
+called me wonder-child. Me--Zoe. Lilly--it's happened ... and you--did
+it. Lilly, kiss me."
+
+"You darling. You're like a queen. All the little lives that go into the
+making of your cloth of gold, yet each proud to be ever so humble a
+party to it!"
+
+"Lilly, you're sad! On _my_ day you're sad."
+
+"Glad! You're the meaning of everything. The road had to lead somewhere.
+Everything is so clear now. You're the lovely meaning, Zoe, behind all
+the circumstances that went to weave you."
+
+Only half plumbed, Zoe sprang from her mood, flashing with all the
+amazing coquetry that was so new to Lilly, around toward Bruce.
+
+"Well--what?"
+
+"On the very day I've found you I've lost you."
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"Fame."
+
+"Nonsense!" she cried. "Don't forget the awakening of spring." And
+buried her face against her mother because she had been outrageous.
+
+Persiflage rose.
+
+"Skylark, when I become more coherent I'll tell you how wonderful you
+are."
+
+"Zoe dear, hadn't we better drive home?"
+
+"Lark. Lark. I cannot go home now, Lilly. Let's have a lark!"
+
+Suddenly Bruce caught her by the dancing hands.
+
+"Let's celebrate."
+
+"Let's!"
+
+"We'll dine at Sherry's, dance at the Bilt--"
+
+"Lovely! Lovely! I've never been to either!"
+
+"No, no, Zoe. Please! Your grandparents at home. Besides, it's war
+time."
+
+"Nonsense! Laugh while we may. Next month this time I'll probably be in
+the thick of it myself. Let's laugh to-day. Vote her down, Zoe!"
+
+"Pl-ease, Lilly."
+
+"Your grandparents, Zoe, they don't even know the news yet--"
+
+"Lilly, this once. Tippy and Dapples aren't going to be thrilled. They
+think the whole business rather low, anyway. Besides--there's time--it's
+my day--Lilly--"
+
+"Not Sherry's, then, Zoe--a quieter--"
+
+"Immense! I have it! Tarrytown. An opportunity to show you the place
+before you go. We'll drop this taxi and pick up my car at the garage.
+How's that, dinner at Tarrytown? Perfect, I'll say."
+
+"What a duck of an idea! Oh, la, la, la, la!"
+
+And so, quite dumbly, Lilly acquiesced and by easy shift to the
+tan-upholstered car that ironed out all jolts, and a stiff breeze from
+the Hudson whirring softly against their faces, they were whirling out
+along quiet stretches, dusk coming down like a veil.
+
+Seated between them, Zoe fell to singing, trilling highly and softly,
+her head bared to the wind, her tam-o'-shanter on Bruce's lap, and Lilly
+sitting silently by with lids down against hot eyeballs, and fighting a
+sense of cross grain.
+
+Presently lights began to come out along the river, like the gold eyes
+of cats.
+
+"How cool your fingers are, Zoe. Like the petals of something."
+
+"Lilly, naughty man is holding back one of my hands on me."
+
+"Lovely hands."
+
+"Naughty man."
+
+Silence.
+
+"Oh dear."
+
+"Oh dearest."
+
+"That wasn't for you. That was a sigh."
+
+"But I stole it."
+
+"Cheeky."
+
+Giggles.
+
+Silence again and they turned off a macadamized road that was
+prematurely dark with trees and into a lariat of driveway that elicited
+from Zoe a squeal of enthrallment.
+
+Even to Lilly, though she had figured in its purchase, there was
+something startling in the vast classic whiteness and formal Italian
+chastity of the house as they flanked it, drawing up under a
+porte-cochere of Corinthian columns. Through a double row of cypresses
+turning black, that inclosed a sunken garden, Dante and Virgil might
+have moved, and yet, Lilly, aching with the analogy which could not
+conjure, could only call up rather foolishly the three-color magazine
+advertisement of a low-streamline motor car, drawn up before just such
+Renaissance magnificence.
+
+Three sheer and cunningly landscaped terraces dropped down from what was
+actually the rear of the house, but which overhung the river, so that,
+stepping out of the car, an unsuspected, breath-taking panorama of river
+wound itself, at that moment the Albany boat moving upstream,
+light-studded.
+
+ZOE (out at a bound): "Oh! Oh! Oh! Isolde's garden. Tristan, where are
+you?"
+
+"Here."
+
+"I want to kiss a star--that luscious one up there."
+
+"Let me be proxy."
+
+"Lilly, chastise him!"
+
+She smiled at him with her tortured eyes.
+
+"Like it?" he said, smiling back at her with something impersonal in his
+eyes that deadened her. "All this formality is hardly my choice; it's
+Pauline's idea."
+
+They were met by Pauline--known to Zoe and her mother through
+perfunctory office meetings. She was exceedingly petite, rather
+appealingly so in her widowhood, and of her younger brother's rather
+Spanish darkness, except for a graying coiffure worn high and
+flatteringly.
+
+There were seventeen years between them and yet her shoulders were
+deeply white, and rose, quite unwithered, out of a jetted evening gown;
+and her profile, also with the heat lightning of a scarcely perceptible
+nervous quiver to it, entirely without the sag of tired flesh.
+
+A certain petulance lent to her exceedingly well-bred diction quite a
+charm, and she was playful and adoring enough to pinch each cheek of her
+brother's as she tiptoed to kiss him.
+
+"Nice boy to bring home charming people and save me from the boredom of
+dining alone. How's my handsome brother? Naughty boy! It's the first
+time you've looked yourself in weeks. They work him too hard down there,
+Mrs. Penny. I tell my fat brother he's become little more than an
+ornamental gargoyle. It's too sordid for this boy, and now you running
+away from him just when I had hoped the time was ripe for him to dabble
+in some of the things he's set his heart on. The kind of plays he reads
+all night until I have to turn his lights out. Shame on you for
+running away!"
+
+Her twitter, from topical bough to topical bough, hardly demanded reply.
+She exclaimed over Zoe, admiring her extravagantly, insisted upon
+kissing away a purely imaginary look of headache from her brother's
+brow, and led the way quite tinily regal, her running line of
+comment unbroken.
+
+In a soft boudoir of French grays, French doors, cerulean blues, and a
+litter of every extravagant requisite of the toilet, Lilly faced herself
+in a cunningly triplicated mirror.
+
+"We're not dressed. We shouldn't have come," trying to ride down her
+sense of misery.
+
+"I'm dressed in all the cloth of gold you have woven for me," quoth Zoe,
+in mock grandiloquence, still pitched to her exultant key and in all
+her youthful capacity for it, full of self.
+
+There were enamel-backed brushes with deep bristles that plowed her hair
+out into dust of gold, and a finely wrought amber comb which she ran
+through the fluff, striking an attitude.
+
+"She walks in splendor like the night--"
+
+"Zoe, you're losing your head."
+
+"Splendor! This is me. Marble--terraces--rugs that slide--only I
+want peacocks--that strut--and tails that open like fans
+and--starlight--him--"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Silly darling--nobody--the world--life."
+
+There was no restraining her. She smoothed her mother's hair only to
+kiss it awry again. She fluffed a fragrant cloud of powder along her
+neck. Trilled at a drowsy canary in a wicker cage. Stretched herself in
+the conscious pose of a Recamier on the lacy mound of a chaise-longue,
+and finally followed her mother into the drawing-room, entirely at ease
+in the straight blue frock.
+
+It was a room almost the width of the house, with a balcony at one end
+hung in a shah's silk prayer rug, and a stone fireplace, out of the
+Davanziti palace, opposite. Three sets of leaded doors opened out on to
+a flagged parapet that overlooked the Hudson and beyond the deep purple
+of perfect September.
+
+They met in a little group at one of these doors, and Lilly noticed
+gratefully that Mrs. Enlow had thrown a net wrap over the formality of
+her evening gown and that Bruce had merely changed to flannels.
+
+He smiled at her with that impersonal sort of kindness which could cause
+such a gush of blood to her heart, and spread himself in a playful
+salaam before Zoe.
+
+"Princess."
+
+She held out her hand to be kissed, which he did five times, finger by
+finger.
+
+"These terraces," said Lilly, trying not to be heavy, "are like the
+setting for an Aegean romance."
+
+He smiled back at her again through the new film across his eyes.
+
+"Write it and I'll produce it."
+
+"Close the doors, Dicky; it's growing chilly," said Mrs. Enlow.
+
+"Yes," said Lilly, shivering a bit, "chilly."
+
+"And I'm burning, Dicky, Tickey Tavey," cried Zoe, applying the name
+audaciously. "How can anyone be chilly on such a night as this?"
+
+"Come, Princess, and I'll show you some stars."
+
+"Don't wander too far before dinner, children. Mrs. Penny and I will sit
+indoors. Only youth can risk swollen joints."
+
+"Yes," said Lilly, feeling herself rather terrifiedly past the fiercer
+rush of life, "only youth."
+
+They sat on a great overstuffed divan that faced the parapet, lighted
+softly at each end by the first lamps of evening.
+
+"Why, you poor child, you're shivering of chill! It's the damp. Let me
+get you a wrap."
+
+In the thickening silence Lilly sat alone looking out through the glass
+doors. Bruce and Zoe were silhouetted out there against a fathomless
+evening sky that was brilliantly pointed with a few big stars. But they
+were not gazing out. Her face was up to his like a flower about to be
+plucked, and, looking down into it, his whole body seemed to sway to its
+sweetness.
+
+Suddenly the ache in Lilly's heart was laid. With all of her old
+capacity for the incongruous, but without any of her usual pump of
+terror, she thought suddenly of her father, two nights hence, sitting
+down to the creamed salmon and fried potatoes on Page Avenue, hanging
+his napkin with the patent fasteners about his neck. Edna Shriner
+must teach her that French-knot stitch for Zoe's gowns--in
+case--heigh-ho!--in case--
+
+With her gaze on those two etched and eloquent profiles, a piercing
+sense of achievement seemed to flow with a warm rush of blood, curing
+her of chill.
+
+Her heart beat high with what even might have been fulfillment.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Star-Dust, by Fannie Hurst
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STAR-DUST ***
+
+***** This file should be named 9858.txt or 9858.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/9/8/5/9858/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and PG
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.