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 jardinière 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 negligée in a pink cotton-crêpe 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 répertoire 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.