She did, tiptoeing and fighting down the sense of sickness.

And thus, out of a bauble of silver and lapis lazuli, was reared a tower

of silence between these brothers as high as fifteen years is long.

Large affairs for their joint unraveling lay ahead, dramatic in their

magnitude. The Union Square Family Theater was very presently to become

first a tawdry, then a discarded link in the glittering chain of

playhouses that was to gird the country.

Toward this end R.J. and Bruce Visigoth steered, with an impeccable

oneness of purpose, the destinies of an enterprise audacious in its

concept and ultimately to be spectacular in its fulfillment.

But outside the sharply defined inclosures of their business lives, the

brothers went down into a wordless vale of fifteen years of

estrangement, not in enmity, but rather as a hatpin, plunged through the

heart, can kill, bloodlessly.

CHAPTER VII

When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted

offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's passions was a gale

through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror

of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a

devastating one in a children's hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat

down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible passions lay

just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl

aged four had once been found battered and dead beside a farm hand's

dinner pail in St. Louis County! Suddenly all the faces she could

conjure began to form staring circles around her--the Visigoths. Minnie

Dupree. Ida Blair. Auchinloss. Phonzie. Phonzie!

She decided to walk fast and long and ran downstairs out into the little

areaway that ran like an alley from stage entrance to sidewalk. A newly

installed nickelodeon, adjoining, was already lighted, throwing out a

hard white shine and tinned music at the instance of five cents in the

slot. In the glaring pallor Bruce Visigoth was suddenly at her side, his

felt hat bunched up in his hand and his hair wet-looking, as if drenched

with perspiration.

"I couldn't let you go without apologizing, Mrs. Penny."

She smiled with lips that would pull to the nervous impulse to cry.

"The idea!" she said, feeling the words tawdry and provincial as they

came.

"It was my fault for permitting it to happen in the presence of a third

party--you especially."

"Those things cannot always be avoided," again biting down into her

tongue for its banality.

"Will you forget it as if it had never occurred?"

She turned her gaze, that could be so singularly clear, full upon him.

"It is already forgotten."

Strangely enough and with unspoken accord they took to walking then at a

clip that was almost a rush and created quite a wind in their faces. It

was their first meeting out of office and here they were half running

through a cool and winey half darkness and utterly without destination.

She stopped abruptly at West Fourteenth Street, beyond the thunder of

the Sixth Avenue Elevated and where the sky line began to dip down

toward the piers.

"Good night," she said, throwing back her head to look up at him from

under the low brim of sailor.

He whipped off his resiliently soft hat, hugging it under one arm.

"Of course," he said, "of course," mopping at his forehead and so

unstrung that she could have laughed. "I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. Is

this where you live?"

They were before a greasily lighted taxidermist's window of mounted

raccoon, fox terrior with legs curled for running, and an owl on

a branch.

"No," she said, eying the owl, "I don't live here," and were both off

into a gale of laughter that swept down the barriers of self-restraint.

"We've both been walking it off," she said, easily. "Here is where I

turn for home."

He caught her hand.

"D-don't go. I'd be so grateful--so grateful if you'd have dinner with

me to-night."

"Nonsense!" she said, amazed at her fluency of manner. "You're a bit

unstrung, that's all. Look in at your club or a show."

"Please."

"All right," she said, suddenly, on a little click of teeth. "I'll

come--this once."

"You're a brick," he cried, releasing her hand with a grateful pressure.

She was excited out of all proportions to the event, flushing up with a

sense of adventure and crowded moment.

He began to scan for a cab.

"Let's walk."

"Not a bit of it," bringing one down with a cane. "We're out on a

party."

"But--"

"No buts," helping her in and climbing in after. "Waldorf."

"I'm too shirtwaisted."

"Nothing of the kind. You're as trim as a dime. I like those waists you

wear. They make you look smooth--shining. That's it, you've a shine

to you."

The odor of another drive in an open cab through this same snarl of

traffic was winding about her like mist. That doctor's outer office with

its row of thoughtful chairs. Rembrandt's "Night-Watch." That frenzied

moment of finding the lock! The run up two flights. She sat forward on

the slippery leather seat.

"I--I shouldn't have come."

"If you're serious, of course I'll take you home. But I can't tell you

how much I want you not to feel that way."

She sat back again.

"I'm behaving like a shop girl."

They both laughed again and complete thaw set in.

He selected one of the lesser dining rooms where the formality of

evening clothes was still the rule, but here and there a couple like

themselves, in street attire. It was her first New York meal that was

not read off a badly thumbed menu and eaten off thick-lipped china. A

stringed orchestra played the Duo of Parsifal and Kundry, which was

enough to set the blood rocking in her veins and some of its bombastic

maternal passion to dye her face.

He ordered a man's dinner: Clear soup with croûtons. Long oysters on the

half shell. A thick steak with potatoes deliciously concocted beneath a

crust of cheese. Light wine. Ices in long glasses as slender as the neck

of a crane. Turkish coffee brewed at the table over alcohol.

She sighed out finally, warm with well-being: "I didn't realize how

deadly tired I was of just--grub. You see, it's the first time I've

dined at a first-class place since I'm in New York."

"You don't mean that."

She nodded, smiling.

"I think I'm as surprised as you are. It's just one of the things that

never occurred to me."

He regarded her for a long moment and without smile.

"You queer, queer girl."

"If anyone tells me that again, I'll begin to believe it is my

inevitable epitaph."

"No epitaph is inevitable. It is what you write it."

She leaned her chin into the cup of her palm.

"Do you think that?"

"Yes, and therefore yours should embody courage and dauntless idealism

and love of truth."

She looked off through the atmosphere that was talcy with soft odors and

the warm perfume of bare shoulders.

"Love of truth," she said, her eyes lit, "would be enough."

"Love of you, would be an epitaph to my liking."

She was afraid he could see the little beating at her throat and wanted

to be facetious. Poor Lilly, to whom persiflage came none too readily.

"Now, you're making sport of me."

"Probably it is a case of laugh that I may not weep."

"Even tears can be idle."

"Or idolizing."

"I suppose I am to surmise over the quality of yours?"

"Well, you have had me guessing for three years. Mrs. Penny. Lilly! I

can't say the other, it--won't s-say itself."

She asked her question with a cessation of her entire being, as if her

heart had missed a beat.

"Hasn't--your--brother--told--you--anything?"

"Oh yes. I know how you threw over the professional end of it for what

you decided you could do better. I thought that pretty plucky; so many

of us mistake inflated judgment for genius and stubbornness for

perseverance, when that same perseverance applied to the job within

one's capacity may lead to fine fulfillment."

"It's good to hear you say that."

"But that is about all I do know--Lilly--except, of course, that there

is a youngster and somewhere in the background a husband whom I would

like to meet out some dark night when I happen to be wearing my favorite

pair of brass knuckles."

Something nameless and shapeless had lifted; there was a gavotte to her

heartbeat.

"My husband was--is a good man."

"But not a wise one if he couldn't hold a creature like you."

"And my child! You talk about shine! Of course I know it is only her

hair and eyes and now her little teeth, but sometimes it seems to me

there is an actual iridescence to her. Just as real as the gold circlets

the Italians loved to paint about heads they adored."

"Your head is--"

"You see, the fuzz of her curls gives that effect. Those new

stereopticon views that move, that we used on the bills last week, show

it--that aura off the hair. Even the nurses and Mrs. Dupree have

remarked Zoe's. She's really the show child of the place, you know."

"By inheritance?"

"No. She's only like me about the eyes, and like--him--in the honey

color of her hair. Hers is as brilliant and curly as mine is dull and

smooth. And she's so big. So golden and burstingly big. I can't look at

her without fairly gasping, 'can this be mine'!"

"And to think a man let you go, once he had you captured."

"He didn't let go. I went. I can never hear him referred to slightingly

without feeling myself a rotter not to explain. My husband was so

terribly all he should have been, Mr. Visigoth. As decent and

God-fearing a man as ever--chewed his beefsteak with his temples."

He threw back his head for one of his sustained laughs.

"It's horrid of me to belittle him. Let me explain further."

"Lord! you don't need to. I know everything about him there is to know.

A fine, hefty truck horse trying to do teamwork with a red-nostriled

filly."

"I--I think that's it--I've never been able to get it across to anyone

before, but--"

"He was just cast wrong. That's all there is to be said against the

chap. Right?"

"Exactly."

"I understand. In a way I'm in a similar position with my own brother.

Only, I've stuck it out because it was my mother's great wish to see us

get on together. After what you have observed these years, particularly

to-day, none of this can be particularly new to you."

"I've noticed, of course, you--you're different."

"It is the little things about Robert I cannot swallow. Never could. He

is the better business man and keeps my head out of the clouds, but many

a time I've wanted to duck these years of apprenticeship and produce the

things I believe in. I will some day, but that is another story. Robert

has vision. His sense of land and theater values is unfailing. He--"

"Well, so is your vision just as unfailing in your work. The chain

didn't even begin to form before you took over the booking end."

"He has fine traits, too. Big ones. His word is his bond. He has

business foresight and integrity, but somehow it is his little

meannesses. I remember once in my father's house he took a thrashing for

something outrageous he was not guilty of, because he had promised some

youngster across the way he would shield him, come what might, and

somehow I thought it pretty fine of him. But another time he let me take

a thrashing for something he had done and stood by without opening his

mouth. It is those indescribable smallnesses in his make-up. Once when I

was in favor of branching out and producing a legitimate three-act play

which I happened to run across--a rare thing from the French--he--well,

I won't go into it--but this thing--to-night--that bauble of my

mother's--it--it's the climax of a lifetime of such flea bites--a trifle

hardly worth the mentioning, and yet--it's the most utter--the most

damnable--"

There was a half crash of his clenched hand among the silver and a rise

of suffusing red up out of the white of his soft collar.

"I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to let you in for any more of it. I'm

sorry. And after you were gracious enough to come alone, too. Come, here

is to making this little party a gay one."

He held up his glass. "Here's to the shining child."

"Oh!" she cried, and drank quickly.

"Like it?"

"Not much. It burns."

"You should see your eyes."

"You should see hers."

"Whose?"

"My child's."

"Do you know what I should have done in your husband's place?"

"What?"

"Harnessed you, too, but to a moonbeam."

"I once knew a man to whom I never spoke ten words in all my life, and

yet I always imagined he might have talked to me like that--not

literally--not in terms of tin dippers."

"Of what, you queer, queer girl?"

"Now I know of whom you remind me! An old school-teacher I once had.

Odd."

"I would never have let you slip my harness through."

"And have deprived the Amusement Enterprise Company of my austere

services!"

"You've been invaluable. Ninety per cent of your judgments have been

ninety-nine per cent there!"

"Luck."

"Luck nonsense! Judgment isn't horseshoe-shaped."

"I love it! Feeling the public pulse for what it wants. The psychology

of your vaudeville audience is as elementary as a primer and as

intricate as life. It is a bloodhound when it comes to detecting the

false from the true. Take that little sketch, 'Trapped,' you sent me out

to see last week. A more sophisticated audience might have mistaken its

brittle epigrammatic quality for brilliancy and its flippancy for

cleverness. But not your ten-twenty-thirty's. In real life a husband

doesn't psychanalyze his wife's lover. He horsewhips him. And that

lovely blank-verse fantasy that you attempted on your own. That is the

sort of thing you are going to stand for some day in the theater. I

loved your wanting it. But right now, while you are on your way up to

the goal, is where I come in. Sort of mediator between your ideals and

the box office. Of course you loved the fantasy. So did I, and I loved

your wanting to do it. But it took vaudeville just one performance to

decide that it wasn't ready for that kind of mysticism."

"And you forty minutes."

"You would never have backed it even over my O.K."

"Then you don't realize how far your O.K. goes with me."

"What is this," she smiled, "a mutual-admiration fête?"

"I don't know," suddenly leaning toward her, reddening. "I can only

speak for myself. Lilly--you're wonderful--"

She chose to be casual, most effectively, too.

"Indeed it is mutual. I need hardly to tell you what association with

your office has meant to me. The romance of an organization like yours.

The thrill of seeing it triple proportions in these few years. The fine

stimulating something that comes with the acquisition of each new

Amusement Enterprise Theater. The chats we have had over plays, play

writing, producing. Your own fine aim. Oh, it has made bearable even the

monotony of the secretarial end of it!"

"I am afraid your secretarial services are about to be dispensed with."

She placed a quick hand to her heart.

"What do you mean?"

He flecked his cigar, laughing over at her.

"You're delicious. What could I mean except that you have outgrown your

job?"

"You--mean--"

"I mean that I am going to officially place you in charge of the booking

department at--well, your own idea of salary."

"I--I don't know what to say."

"Don't say anything."

"You can't know--"

"I do know."

"You see, she is almost four now, and beautifully cared for, but, now

that her little mind is beginning to unfold--I--Oh, to be able to afford

a place of my own--next year--when she has outgrown Mrs. Dupree's. You

see, I've never really had her. I've such plans for the day when I can

have her rearing all to myself. I want life to unfold so naturally to

her. Like a flower. That's why I am so terribly jealous of every day we

spend apart. That's why you--you cannot know what it means to have you

tell me that I've made good. It means that the time is nearing for me to

have her with me, to--to--Well, you cannot--cannot know!"

She sat back, feeling foolish because her eyes were filling and trying

to smile back the tears.

He reached over to place his palms over her hand.

"How rightly named you are! 'Lilly.' One of those big, milky-spathed,

calla lilies. Calla Lilly."

"We'll be going now," she said, feeling for her jacket.

They rode down to Eleventh Street in a cab, almost silently, and as she

sat looking out, unsmiling, she could feel his gaze burn her profile.

He left her at the stoop, standing bareheaded.

"You've saved me from an evening of horrors."

"I'm glad."

"You're not angry--Calla Lilly?"

"Of course not."

"How soon again?"

"No."

"Yes, yes!"

"No."

And somehow the word was like a plummet deep into the years ahead.

CHAPTER VIII

One hot Saturday afternoon, at least a twelvemonth later, as Lilly was

rushing down from the children's department of one of Broadway's

gigantic cut-rate department stores, she stopped so abruptly that she

created a little throwback in the sidewalk jam.

Her miracle was broken. Her first impulse even now was to dart back, but

the tow of the crowd was strong, and, besides, she was suddenly eye to

eye with an exceedingly thin youth with a very long neck rising far

above a high collar, a pasty and slightly pimpled face evidently slow to

beard, and a soft hat pulled down over meek light-blue eyes, himself

even more inclined to push on than she.

It was her first encounter since her clean cleavage from a strangely

remote dream phase of her existence. For the first three years she had

carried about a fear of some such meeting, a passer-by brushing her

shoulders or a sense of presence at her back sending a shock through

her. Once she had hurriedly left a Subway train because of a fancied

likeness to Roy Kemble in a young fellow across the aisle. Even now

there were days when fancied resemblances seem to people the crowds.

"Why, Harry Calvert!"

"Hello," he said in the tempo of no great surprise, but purpling up into

his lightish hair. "I know you. You're Lilly Becker."

"Harry, I cannot believe my eyes! I haven't seen you since you were in

knickers. And to think we remembered each other! Come here a minute out

of the crowd. I want to talk to you."

He followed her with some reluctance and a great sheepishness out of

Broadway into quieter Thirty-fourth Street, twirling his hat, his

nervousness growing.

"You look fine, Lilly."

"What are you doing here, Harry? How is your grandma? St. Louis?"

She could have embraced, cried over him, the loneliness of years seeming

to rush to a head.

"Gramaw and I live here."

"Harry, not really!"

"Nearly two years, now."

"Where?"

"'Way out near Tremont Avenue."

"And you, Harry, what do you do?"

"I was window dresser for a gents' furnishing store up to a few weeks

ago, but it--it changed hands. I'm out of a job right now."

"Harry, do you ever hear from--home?"

"No, Miss Lilly, we never see anyone from there. You're the first."

"I'll tell you what. I'm going home with you. Take me out with you to

visit your grandma. I haven't seen her in years--it's been so long

ago--everything."

He was wringing his hat now and shifting.

"It's a long way out, Lilly. It's hardly built up out there at all."

"I don't care. I'll buy some pastries on the way and we will make a

party of it. Does she still keep boarders?"

"Roomers."

"Poor, dear Mrs. Schum, fancy her living here!"

They rode out on a surface car, changing twice and jammed face to face

on a rear platform, a brilliant pink out in her face.

"Harry, I just cannot realize it. You a full-fledged man!"

"I'm twenty-four."

"What is that yellow on your fingers? Not from smoking?"

"I used to a lot, but not now."

"Is your grandmother just as wrapped up in you as ever, Harry? Poor

dear!"

"Yes, she is. You sure look fine, Lilly. You're pretty!"

"And what in the world brought you to New York and what ever became of

Mr. Hazzard and--"

"Oh, gramaw read in the paper once that he died of that sore on his

face."

"And old Willie and Mr. Keebil and Snow Horton--ever see any of them,

Harry?"

"No; you see it is nearly two years since--"

"I have a little daughter--almost five years old!"

"Gramaw followed up in the papers when you were married. Flora Kemble

and Roy, they're both married, too."

"Harry, didn't you ever hear anything about--well, about my marriage?"

"Yes, there was something about it. I forget. You live in New York?"

"Yes, and, Harry, don't say anything when we get to your home. Just let

me walk in and surprise her."

"Yes."

More and more she noticed his indoor whiteness and the eyelids which

would twitch nervously.

"Do you keep well, Harry?"

"Fairly."

There was quite a walk from the car, across a viaduct, down a flight of

steps, and into a steep new street of flimsy-looking apartment houses of

the dawning era of vertical homes. But the Harlem River, neat as a

canal, flowed within easy view and there was something very scoured

about the expression of the just graded street of occasional vacant

lots, showing the first break in the continuity of city brick that

Lilly's tired eyes had encountered.

"Why, Harry, I've never been away out here before! How nice and clean!"

"Here we are."

They entered one of the tan-brick buildings, "El Dorado" writ in elegant

gilt script across the transom. Then up three flights of clean, new,

fireproof stairs, Harry inserting his key into one of the two doors that

faced the landing.

"Sh-h-h, Harry! Tell her it is just a friend."

Old odors laden with memory rushed to meet her; that pungency which,

unaccountably enough, reeks of the cold boiled potato, and which old

upholsteries, windowless hallways, and frequent meat stews can generate.

There was a blob of low-pressure gaslight in the hallway, a weak and

watery eye burning from a side bracket into the odor so poignant with

association. Tony Eli drowned at eighteen. Her father peering behind the

dresser. "Where's Lilly?" "Here I am!" Herself hugging up her knees in

their stout ribbed stockings, her round gaze on the red-glass globe with

the warts blown into it.

There it was, that same glass globe around the puny light; and the

hatrack--the one with the seat that opened for rubbers and school bags.

"Gramaw, come out. Here is some one."

A long cooking fork in her hand, and a puff of steam hissing out after

her, Mrs. Schum peered into the hallway. She was strangely smaller,

Lilly thought, as if the flesh were beginning to wither off the rack of

her bones.

"Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum!"

"Who's that?"

"Come out, gramaw. It's no one to be afraid of."

"Harry!" Her voice came cracking out like a shot. "Harry, are you in

trouble?"

"No--no--"

"Who is hounding you? If you are here about my grandson, madam, they are

all the time trying to get the best of my boy. He hasn't broken parole

since old Judge Delahanty down in the Twenty-third Street Court--"

"Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum! Don't you know me? Please! Think, dearie,

the little girl out in St. Louis who used to plague you for bread

and butter--"

The old face loosened, the eyes peering through spectacles held across

the nose with a bit of twine.

"It isn't--Lilly--Becker?"

"Right the first time, gramaw!"

"Bless my heart! Bless my soul! Let me sit down. I'm right weak. Little

Lilly--Becker!"

They embraced there in a hallway hardly wide enough to contain them.

These two, who ordinarily might have met again, after such a span of

years, in the mildest of reunions, here in each other's arms, hungrily,

heartbeat to heartbeat.

"Lilly, Lilly, come in here and let me look at you. Light up the front

room, Harry. Well, I declare! Let me sit down. I'm right weak-kneed.

Law! pretty is no name! Well, I declare!"

In the little front room of chromos, folding bed with desk attachment,

a bisque knickknack or two, they were finally knee to knee, Lilly's hat

tossed aside, her hands clasping the old veiny ones.

"Begin at the beginning, Mrs. Schum. Everything. First, tell me, dear,

how long since you have heard of my folks?"

"Harry, you go out in the kitchen and keep the things warm until gramaw

comes out to dish up. Set the table with a cloth on, and run over to the

delicatessen for a bit of cold cuts. He's a right smart help to me,

Lilly. Not like some boys, too proud to help. And now--now--let me

see--why, it's two years since I met your mother downtown in St. Louis

before I had any idea of coming here."

"How did she look?"

"Splendid. She was with one of her euchre friends, so I didn't have the

chance for an old-time chat, but she made me promise to come and see

her, and 'pon my word, just as young and pretty as you please, with a

fine face veil and a purple feather boa and shopping out of the Busy Bee

bins just the way she used to do."

"She looked--happy?"

"Indeed she did! Buying some menfolk stuff. Wool socks, I think she

said, for your father, was it, who is subject to colds in the head--"

"No, those weren't for papa. Oh, Mrs. Schum, it's so good to hear of her

first hand like this! What--what did she say about me?"

"Told me about you off here studying opera, and your husband was making

his home with them. I--I took it from what she said you were none too

happy with him, but I had no idea of your being here still! Aren't

things well with you, Lilly? I always said you reminded me of my Annie,

and she would have turned out something big if she had lived. I expect

it of you, too, Lilly."

"What else?"

"She put up a bold front with me, I will say that, never letting on that

there had been trouble. And then just before I left--we came away mighty

unexpectedly--Katy Stutz--"

"Katy Stutz--"

"Yes, came to sew for a family I had boarding with me, and she said she

heard you had left him for good and that your parents took sides with

your husband and had him in their home, occupying your very room, and

that your mother was as fussy over him as she ever was over you, babying

him to death. Lilly, Lilly, what is wrong with you?"

"And my father, Mrs. Schum?"

"Fine. Mary says he's a bit whiter, but not a whit changed. He's done

well in the rope business, hasn't he? Although I always say it was your

mother's practical ways got him on his feet, and from what I understand

that young man you married has given him many a lift. They've gone in

business together, haven't they? They tell me, Lilly, there is not a

steadier or more advancing young man than yours. Ah me, the ways of

young ones are strange I guess you haven't heard about Harry, either?"

"No."

"He's a good boy, Harry is, Lilly, but I've been through trouble with

him. That's the reason for our being here. You see, Lilly, him being a

poor orphan all his life, they're all against him. The little fellow

never had the right raising, knocking around with all those nigger

servants, and me with never the time to do for him."

"Oh, Mrs. Schum, how can you! Why, there wasn't any of the youngsters

in the boarding house had a sweeter influence over him than Harry."

"No, no. It was all my fault. I was too pressed trying to make ends

meet. I should have given up that big house years ago for a few roomers

like now. He got in bad ways, Lilly. Not noisy and with gangs like some

rough boys would. But quiet--solitary-like. I never knew him to hang

around with that gang of boys that used to loaf over at Pirney's drug

store or anything like that, but after the Kembles and you folks left,

Harry got to stealing, Lilly. Little things. The child never took

anything more than a bit of lead pipe from Quinn's empty house across

the street, and once a little silver trinket from a milliner I had up in

the third floor front--"

"He used to do little things like that when he was a child, don't you

remember, dear?"

"It's his father in him, Lilly. Maybe you don't know it, but that's what

killed my Annie, that same streak which was the ruination of a fine,

educated man like his father. But Harry's got too much of his mother in

him to be all bad; he--"

"Of course he has, dear."

"To get back to our coming East, Lilly. One night he--Harry brought me

home a brooch, Lilly. A right pretty gold one with a garnet in. It used

to hurt him that I never had any finery. He wouldn't take anything to

buy drink and bad times for himself like other boys, but he'd steal

something to bring home to his old grandmother. All that night, Lilly,

down there in the basement kitchen, I was nearly crazy trying to get out

of him where he got that brooch. The next day they was after him, for it

and some--nickel-plated facets from out of the washroom where he was

working. They hushed it up. Old Judge Mayer, you remember his sister

used to board with me. But the next time there was a little

trouble--this time a--a little finger ring--not even all gold. I--we--we

had to sell out and come here--where we could be swallowed up."

"Oh, Harry, Harry, how could he!"

"Wasn't his fault. It wasn't the place for him out there any more with

everybody against a poor orphan. I've cut him off, Lilly, from his bad

ways out there. You're the first I've seen or heard of since we left,

and I don't want you to even write it to your folks that we're here.

There's the little matter of that ring--not even all gold--and--some

lead pipe--forgotten, now--please God, but they might want him back for

it--that's how down on him they are. He's a good boy, Harry is, Lilly,

with respect for his grandmother. He's had a slip up or two, but the

best of us have that, haven't we?"

"Yes."

"It's to be expected. A boy can't shake off his inheritance overnight,

can he? Can he?"

"No, I suppose not, dear."

"Don't let on, Lilly. He's sensitive. We'll win yet, Harry and me will.

The world hasn't taken much stock of a poor little basement orphan, but

with the kind of mother he had, his grandmother will live yet to see the

day that it does take account of him. Harry's right smart with draping

and decorating around the house, and if I do say it, when he dresses a

window the traffic stops. He's a great one for reading and following up

the magazines, too. Smart. I'd stake my all on a boy that has got it in

him to treat his grandmother with the gentleness he does. And children!

There is not one on the street he can pass for love of them. A boy like

that cannot be all bad, can he, Lilly?"

Her eyes magnified with the glaze of tears so that one blink would have

overflowed them, Lilly laid her lips to the veiny old hand, her voice

down into the lap of blue-checkered apron.

"We mothers--Mrs. Schum--God, how we love to suffer to them!"

"We!"

Her face in the tired old lap, the little room seeming to crowd up with

voice, Lilly talked on then, until the little clock inset into a china

plate ticked out an hour, and in the kitchen, Harry, with all his old

capacity for meekness, lay asleep with his head in his arms and the

little dinner cloying on the stove.

"I'm afraid my old brain don't take it all in, Lilly. You mean your

mother--father--none of them--know?"

"It isn't for you to understand, dear. The mere telling of it has

somehow eased things. We are bits of seaweed, dear Mrs. Schum, tossed up

on the same shores. You and your fugitive from environment. Me and mine.

If your secret is to be mine, mine must be yours."

"God have mercy on you, Lilly, wherever it is your ways are leading

you."

"He has had, Mrs. Schum."

"I don't know. I don't know. You know best, I guess, what is in your

heart."

"I do. It's this. Why can't you take--us?"

"Who?"

"I want her with me. She is getting big enough for the kind of training

I have all mapped out for her. And now you--it's nothing short of

destiny led me to you. I could put her in day school. Can take her

myself in the mornings, say, and you, dear Mrs. Schum, are to call for

her? I can pay, I can help you and you can help me. Later we may take a

larger place with extra room. Mrs. Schum, don't you see, we've been

thrown together!"

"Why, Lilly--I believe--I do."

It was after ten o'clock when, over a belated little meal, they ceased

their planning. Eleven, when Harry finally walked with her across the

viaduct to the street car. Stars were out. Thick white ones. She skipped

a little, ran a little, and stood a moment at the parapet, looking down

at the lights which followed the narrow course of the river. She felt

suddenly wild for bauble. Her flesh, which never particularly craved the

lay of fine fabric, felt cheated. She wanted to wind her body to its

utmost flexuosity, bare her throat to the wind, and fling out a gesture

the width of Vegas to Capella.

At the corner she took Harry's face between her hands, kissing him

soundly on the lips.

"Good night, Harry, and God bless you for letting me find you."

Long after that kiss, ever so lightly bestowed, lay burning against his

lips and she had boarded the street car, he stood looking after, with

his very light-blue eyes.

Book Three

THE WINE

CHAPTER I

When Zoe Penny was still in knee frocks she graduated, first in her

class, from the public grade school. It was a period of great stress for

Lilly, of happy shopping and the sweet anxieties of ribbon and frock,

and there were always two high circles of color out on her cheeks, and

from time to time she would force herself to sit down, uncurl her

fingers of their tensity, as Ida Blair had taught her, and thus,

starting in at the hands, try to relax.

After two or three moves from the makeshift of the Tremont Avenue

apartment, they were finally installed in an old brownstone walk-up

house in West Ninety-third Street, a stone's throw removed from an

avenue of Elevated structure and petty shops, but with a quiet enough,

if gloomy, dignity. One of those tunnel dwellings, the light from the

front room and kitchen gradually petering out into a middle room of

almost absolute darkness.

Lilly and her daughter occupied what corresponded to the parlor, a room

of white woodwork, flimsy white mantelpiece, and gilded radiator; one of

the vertical layers and layers of just such city parlors. Two narrow

front windows looked down into Ninety-third Street and there were closed

white folding doors with again a rented piano against them. A pretty

screen of Japanese paper with a sprig of wistaria across it shut off a

bureau with a layout of much juvenile claptrap of hair ribbons, side

combs, and the worthless treasures of childhood. Between the windows a

"lady's" desk with hinged writing slab, really Lilly's, but mostly the

dangling place for a pair of Zoe's roller skates and its pigeonholes

bulging with her daughter's somewhat extraneous matter. But there were a

two-tone brown rug, and yellow silk curtains saved the room from the

iniquitous Nottingham and Axminster school of interior defamation. The

walls, too, were tempered of their whiteness by brown prints of the

"Coliseum by Night," "The Age of Innocence," and Watt's "Hope,"

blindfolded, atop the world.

These pictures had been shopped one Saturday afternoon at the cut-rate

department store and were largely Zoe's choice, happily corroborated

by Lilly.

"Remarkable selections for a miss," said the clerk.

"Do you really think so?" cried Lilly, herself turning away from an

inclination toward the more chromatic and immediately exhilarated out of

a state of fatigue.

"Zoe, you're wonderful!"

"You're wonderful, too, Lilly."

There had been scarcely any baby talk.

At three, it was "Zoe, are you happy to see mother this week-end?"

"Ees, ummie."

And then one day out of the pellucid sky of babyhood, in answer to this

invariable query, it was:

"Yes, Lilly," so suddenly that something seemed to catch at her

heartbeat, but after a pang she let it stand.

Let Lilly's Zoe dawn upon you through this rather typical conversation

between them, the night before the graduation from grade school:

"Lilly, am I beautiful?"

"Why, yes, Zoe, so long as you remain fine and unspoiled by it. That is

the rarest kind of loveliness--inner beauty."

"I don't mean that kind. Am I pretty--for boys to look at?"

"You are pretty enough as little girls go, if that is what you mean."

"Is it wrong to have beaus?"

"That all depends. Why?"

"Oh, I just wanted to know."

Silence.

"A boy in my class, Gerald Prang, says he is my beau."

"Silly fellow."

"Ethel Watts has one. They kiss."

"That's horrid."

"Is it horrid for me and Ethel to kiss?"

"No, Zoe, you know it isn't."

"Would it be horrid for me and Gerald--Gerald and I--to kiss?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Listen, Zoe, a new word. The most beautiful and the most horrible thing

in the world can be sex."

"Sex?"

"Yes, dear. We haven't used the term in our talks--yet."

"Isn't it nice?"

"That lies with you."

"Then what is sex?"

"Zoe, the world of human beings is divided into two great classes, isn't

it? Boys and girls."

"Oh, I know! It's me and Gerald."

"In a way, yes, but--"

"If me and Ethel kiss, it isn't sex, but if me and Gerald kiss, it is."

"If only you wouldn't keep your mind running ahead. I want to be so

sure you are going to understand. That's what our botany and physiology

study has been for. To prepare you to understand. Now take the kingdom

of flowers, a rose, for instance--"

"Begin with us, Lilly. I don't want to hear any botany."

"But, Zoe--"

"Storks cannot bring babies, can they?"

"No. No. Who put such silly nonsense into your head? Don't let that

stupid fable hide from you the beautiful truth of birth. That is an

absurd story, Zoe, invented by those to whom the most sublime fact in

the world seems nasty. Babies are born, dear--out of lo--out of the

union of the sexes."

"Lilly, you are all trembling."

She took her daughter's face between her hands, her eyes probing and

yearning down into the brilliantly blue ones.

"It is because I want to keep life clean and beautiful for you. Nothing

that is natural is ugly, Zoe. It's only when we make something dark and

shameful of nature's methods that we are apt to misunderstand and

to err."

"Did you err, Lilly?"

"How?"

"With him?"

"Who?"

"Penny."

"Zoe! Zoe! why will you refer to him that way? Yes, I erred out of

ignorance, the kind I want to save you from. In my case your father had

to pay for the ignorance of a girl who married him without knowing what

marriage meant. Ignorance!"

"How funny to hear that--word."

"What word?"

"Father."

"Zoe! Zoe! Have I made it clear to you about him? How good--how

kind--how wronged by me?"

"You are always so afraid I won't understand that. Why shouldn't I?"

"Because it is hard, dear, for you to grasp it all--especially its

effect upon you. Some day you will understand how gradually I have tried

to prepare your mind to judge me. Even this little graduation to-morrow

is a milestone and makes me want to talk to you just a wee bit plainer.

Zoe, I--Zoe, does--does--"

"What?"

"Does it ever make you unhappy among the other children to be questioned

about your--father?"

"No."

"Do you ever feel that you would like to see him?".

"No."

"Why?"

"Because he is dull. He would spoil things for us."

"But doesn't it ever seem terrible to you, Zoe, that I haven't given you

the opportunity to judge him for yourself? If the day ever

comes--to-day, tomorrow, next year--that you want your father, you

understand, dear, don't you, that I will be the first to--"

"I tell you No! No! Why do you always keep telling me that? No! No! It's

better his not knowing there is a me! He makes me feel all suffocated up

the way he did you. I couldn't stand it. I want to be what I want

to be!"

"Oh, want it badly enough then, Zoe; want it badly enough!"

"The greatest singer in the world! That's what I want to be, and stand

on a stage with all the music there is around me as if I was in the

middle of an ocean of it. Lilly, will you take me to another matinée to

see Bernhardt? She makes me feel what I want to be. Just--just her being

what she--is makes me--want to be what I--am."

"You funny muddled youngster! Why, you didn't understand either what she

said or what the play was about."

"I didn't need to. It was her voice. Something she says with her voice

that I feel inside of me, only I can't say it. I wanted to cry. Isn't it

queer, Lilly, to feel so happy you want to cry? Oh, I've learned a new

one--only my voice won't say it the way I feel it. It's in our school

Wordsworth. Something inside of me cries all the time I'm saying it:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath elsewhere had its setting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, Who is our home.

"Oh, Lilly--Lilly--I love that!--trailing clouds of glory--"

"You recited it beautifully, darling. See, you've made me cry."

"And I--I love you, Lilly. Hold me tight. I love you."

"My baby."

"Lilly, will you be--angry if I ask you something?"

"What?"

"Why--do you cry in the night sometimes?"

"Why, Zoe! Do I?"

"You know you do. I can feel you crying, and sometimes when I touch your

face--"

"Why, child--that's just my way. At night--things can be so real--so

terribly real. It is something you cannot understand yet."

"Do I make you sad?"

"No! No! No! My light, my life."

"Is it--Bruce?"

"Why, child--you talk nonsense! Don't speak of him as Bruce."

"I hate calling him Mr. Visigoth. It sounds--meek. I won't be meek! Are

you sure, Lilly, it isn't him--he?"

"Why, child, in Heaven's name should it be?"

"He looks at you so, Lilly. Maybe he makes you cry the way Bernhardt

makes me cry. By what he doesn't say. Saturday afternoons when I call

for you--he looks at you so when you're not looking."

"Why shouldn't he? We've worked together for all these years."

"You and he, when you stand up together you look so--so--_right_."

"Zoe, you are talking nonsense."

"But you're all red, aren't you?"

"No."

"Was it sex to say that?"

"No."

"Are you glad he is coming to-night?"

"Mr. Visigoth and I have business together, Zoe. We cannot sit around in

public places and discuss matters. I'm reading Mrs. Blair's play to him.

Go to bed now, dear."

"Mayn't I stay up?"

"No."

Her child looked up at her, chin cupped in her small hand and crystals

of light out in her eyes.

"Please, Lilly--why do you cry?"

"Why, darling, I don't cry because of anything you are quite ready to

understand. You know that, don't you, dear? There is nothing mother

won't talk over with you as soon as you are ready to take it all in.

That is part of her scheme for keeping life beautiful and free of rude

shocks for you."

"But I do understand--Lilly."

Long after her child slept that night Lilly sat beside her. She loved

the willful way the curls flung across the pillow. She leaned to the

full deep-chested breathing; leaned to kiss the lips which, slightly

parted, were perfect with the pollen of vitality.

CHAPTER II

She drew the screen finally about the little davenport, fussing at the

room, straightening it into a sort of formality with a woman's intuition

for this chair one-half inch closer to the hearth and that picture ever

so slightly straighter. The sheer frock she hung up in a closet,

covering it with a shroud of tissue paper, wadding her daughter's

none-too-carefully flung stockings into her shoes and tiptoeing to place

them beside the davenport. They were strong, ribbed stockings, still

warm and full of curves. She stroked over each. Once she paused at the

mantelpiece mirror, drawing back her lip from the even whiteness of her

teeth, perusing her points rather absent-mindedly.

Time had handled Lilly with a caress. At past thirty she was herself at

twenty, with even more youth, because at twenty she had looked herself

almost ten years hence. She had rounded out a bit, but not fatly. If

stouter at all, it was only in the slightly deeper look to the

cream-colored skin. There were two lines across her forehead, but they

had been there at eighteen and were quite obviously the result of

tilting her eyebrows so that the flesh folded; and besides, they

relieved her clearness, these horizontal traceries, of utter limpidity.

She had drifted, not all unconsciously, into a certain picturesque

uniformity of dress and could smile now over the large, cart-wheel hats,

coarse embroideries, and short-vamp shoes; neither was she often above

mentally contrasting herself in her annual seventy-five dollar suit of

dark-blue serge, natty sailor hat, and impeccable blouse, with a certain

coffee-colored linen with its slashings of coffee-dipped embroidery, and

the blouse that twirled with yards and yards of cotton Valenciennes.

There was still something of the look of the nun to Lilly, but a bit too

pinkly, as if she had dressed the part for Act One, but wore the ballet

skirts for Act Two underneath.

Her reaction asserted itself in her child. At thirteen Zoe wore straight

frocks of navy-blue alpaca with wide patent-leather belts and deep Eton

collars. They were mistaken sometimes, and, strangely enough, to Lilly's

invariable chagrin, for sisters, and Lilly, in her refutation, could be

smitingly swift.

At nine o'clock, to the staccato of three rings, she admitted Bruce

Visigoth, leading him down the tube of hallway. It annoyed her

unspeakably that Harry Calvert, collarless, poked out his head from a

doorway as they passed, and she was suddenly conscious of the smell of

stew. She had meant to burn an incense stick.

But she walked with that free, Hellenic stride of hers, without apology

and ahead of him.

"This is our room. Zoe is asleep there behind that screen. Won't you sit

down?"

He placed his hat and a light bamboo stick across the center table,

obviously oppressed with a sense of close quarters.

"Tell you what! Suppose we taxi over to Claremont. It's mild enough to

sit out on the terrace."

She met him with her levelest gaze.

"Aren't you going to be comfortable here?"

"Of course I am. There you go, getting sensitive right off. Only it is

a warmish evening, and why keep the sun-child awake?"

"Zoe can sleep," she said, with the barely perceptible arch to her

brows, "even through the fire of your presence."

"Good!" he said, seating himself in great good nature and trying not to

be quizzical. "So this is where you live."

He was frankly curious, his gaze humorous, but traveling over details,

his head upflung and the scenting movement to his nostrils. He had not

changed in weight, but in compactness and as if the house of his being

had settled with a fine kind of firmness. He was a bit squarer of jaw

and shoulder and ever so prematurely, and to the enormous fancy of

women, inclined to a hoar frost of gray at the temples.

She seated herself across the little square of table.

"You don't seem to care for us here."

"Certainly I do, only--only--"

"Only what?"

"Only--well, hanged if I make you out, lady. This place--it just isn't

you--that's all."

"Nonsense! I don't count. I'm just a sort of a means to an end, anyway."

"What end?"

"The wine!"

"The what?"

"Oh, nothing," she said, and laughed.

"Laugh again."

"Why?"

"I like it."

She looked her most serio-comic disapproval and held up a forefinger

with a warning little waggle to it.

"Please," she said, with an inlay of something deeper in her voice,

"don't begin by spoiling things."

"Rather not," he said. "I'm going to live up to your letter of the law."

Except for the frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street

offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and

shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that

stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus

tête-à-tête. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union

Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a

Saturday, the day of Zoe's invariable luncheon downtown and subsequent

opera matinee, he had strolled by what seemed mischievous chance into

the tea room where they were dining, but the occasion had hardly been a

success. There had been a great deal of badinage between him and Zoe,

but Lilly had finished her meal almost in silence. The day following, a

toy piano of complete range and really excellent workmanship had

arrived. She returned it without showing it to Zoe. These incidents lay

between them now.

"So this is where you live," he repeated, as if his long curiosity could

not find satiety in fact.

"That I have an abode seems to amaze you."

"It does. You're such a detached sort. You rise so above the mundane

things that clutter up life, that it is pretty much of a shock to

realize that you use tooth powder and carry a latchkey. It's hard to

reconcile Chopin and George Sand probably to those famous raw-meat

sandwiches they loved to eat at midnight. Well, that's about the way I

feel about you--hemmed in by--dull reality such as this."

"I like raw-meat sandwiches," she said.

"Me too."

They laughed.

She took up a sheaf of manuscript.

"If it doesn't bore you too much, I'm going to read it straight

through."

"Oh, I forgot; the play, of course."

She looked up at him as if over spectacles.

"What else?"

"You say it has been the rounds?"

"Yes. Peddled in every office in New York. Kline and Alshuler kept it

two years. Forensi paid her two hundred and fifty dollars advance on it

and then let his option lapse. For another year there was some talk of

Comstock and Comstock doing it, and then finally Hy Wolff got hold of it

and the very month he died paid her a second two hundred and fifty to

renew his option on it. I've always felt that if Ida had kept after Hy

Wolff he would have produced it. He had faith in it, but somehow just

didn't seem to get to it. You see, Ida hasn't any gumption--not the kind

of aggressiveness the game demands. That is why in fifteen years you

scarcely know she is in your office. That is why I plunged in and tried

to rewrite 'The Web' with her. It's a big story, sweated out of her own

agony. She may never write another. Probably won't. My little part in it

has merely been to help her co-ordinate--round up the jumble of her

ideas, so to speak. There is a big play somewhere in this story. I know

you didn't like it as a sketch--I didn't, either. A short play cannot

contain this drama. But out of a clear sky it occurred to me that you

might see it as a three-act play. Oh, I know it isn't the kind of thing

you've your mind's eye on, but why not take that step over into the

legitimate _via_ a big popular success? It may pave the way to bigger,

finer things. Who knows--Ida Blair--'The Web'--may mean the beginning of

your dream come true."

His mouth had straightened and thinned.

"You're right there. Ultimately I'll get into the other. If my brother

knew as much about the booking end as he does the realty, I'd have gone

over long ago. That is the most the success of the Amusement Enterprise

can mean to me--to afford some day the legitimate as a plaything. It

costs money to educate the public to better things. It's been profitable

playing down to its taste--some day it is going to enable me to afford

to be sufficiently altruistic to foot the bills for serving up the best.

It costs to educate.",

"Fine! And it is only a question of time until you are ready for that

inspiring fray. Meanwhile, why not help foot those bills with a little

side flier in 'The Web'?"

"You are a little opportunist, aren't you?".

"I know 'The Web' isn't art. But it is a cross section of reality with

the veins exposed and the sap of life running through them. Mrs. Blair,

poor dear, can't write. God knows I can't. That is why the play has been

through years of lying around in every office in New York. But the idea

is there. You see, it is everything she has lived through. You know

her story?"

"Yes."

"There is a scene when he comes screaming out of the room after having

been through the third degree, half blind from the terrible lights and

the terrible circle of terrible eyes, that isn't writing at all. It's

life--a raw, palpitating picture of a social abuse that can touch the

public as a reform measure can never hope to. Then the character of the

boy--a delinquent. We've one right here in this apartment. One of those

sweet, shy, half-frightened boys as gentle as a girl. The kind that

tells the neighborhood children Peter Pan and reads his grandmother to

sleep. I would trust him anywhere with Zoe, and yet there's the streak!

The criminal, congenital streak through him that is as pathological as

measles. Only we handle it under the heading of criminology. It's like

taking an earache to the chiropodist. The boy is a thief. It's through

him like a rotten spot, but instead of curing him the law wants to

punish him. It's like spanking a child for having the measles. But to

get back--Mrs. Blair has him in this play--just as if she had lifted him

out of this apartment. She wrote him from the life, too. A young fellow

who used to be on her husband's beat. It may not be fine writing, but

'The Web' has the throb of reality through it, and it is my opinion that

one pulsebeat of life is worth all your chastity of form."

"Right."

"We're one on that? Good! Well, here is your opportunity to solder the

first link into the legitimate. Keep it in mind while I am reading Ida

Blair's play and remember I am not talking Ida Blair or Lilly Penny to

you. I'm talking this play just as I would talk an act to you. Because I

believe in it."

He seemed to look at her through her words, a smile out in his eyes.

"You're not listening."

"I am," he said, "but your hair looks like it is painted on, the way it

comes down to that smooth little peak in front. Jove! it's pretty."

She looked off, wanting not to color.

"Come," he said, "I apologize. Read. I'm as predisposed as I can be

toward anything conceived by that little dormouse of a person in

the office."

"That's the trouble. You men are too often satisfied with a surface

inventory. The vault of heart sometimes yields up rare treasures."

"How like you to say that."

"Ready?"

"Go!"

And so, with her head bent so that the light burnished its smoothness,

she read him "The Web" through two uninterrupted hours, her voice

throbbing into the quiet. In the third act, when a half-crazed victim of

the third degree is led out in shuddering and horrible invocation, she

sprang to her feet for an instant, her gesture decrying its fullest arc.

She was like Iphigenia praying for death, he thought.

Later, when the shades of the prison house begin to dawn upon the

stunned consciousness of the woman, there were tears in her voice and on

her lashes, and one fell to the back of her hand, which she wiped off

against her skirt, like a child.

At eleven o'clock she finished, regarding him brilliantly through her

flush.

He had wanted to smoke, but thrust the case back into his pocket,

sitting tilted, his hands locked at the back of his head and gazing at

the line of the picture molding. Her lips parted as the paused held.

"Well?"

He uncrossed his knees, straightening.

"Well?"

"Strong."

"Then it did grip you?"

"Yes, but I can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the

average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about

that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be

entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the

little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an

out-and-out--what shall I say?--an out-and-out crook play, to coin

a phrase."

"Exactly. It is a section of life about which your average playgoer

knows little or nothing and yet one for which he nourishes a tremendous

curiosity."

"It's crude--"

"I know, but the idea is bigger than the writing is crude. If I had the

money I would take a chance on producing it to-morrow. It has social and

sociological value, and at the same time is corking-good entertainment.

I read the police-inspector scene to my little girl just to see what she

would get out of it. 'Why,' she cried, 'a man would confess to anything

with that white light on him and those big policemen's eyes on him.

That's not fair! That shouldn't be allowed. Isn't there a way to stop

it?' That from a thirteen-year-old! It's one of those man-made abuses

that if we women ever get the vote we'll go after! Don't answer me on

this play now, Mr. Visigoth. Take it to your hotel. Read it over again.

Talk it over with your brother when he comes next week. How's that? No

snap judgment."

"Good. The play is on the docket for the evening. Now let us get the

taste of the underworld out of our mouths. How would the Claremont

appeal now?"

"I'd rather not."

"Well, I suppose that amounts to my _congé?_"

She smiled with her brows arched.

"It is after eleven."

He was incessantly feeling for his cigarette case and then with a

certain unease refraining.

"You may," she said, "one, before you go."

He held the case to her. She took one gingerly, accepting the light more

gingerly.

"I don't like them," she said, exhaling with the violence of the

unaccustomed.

"Then whyfore?"

"Because it is a stupid convention which says that a man may and a woman

may not. Why should it be a matter of course for you and, in most cases,

a matter of comment and even vulgarity for me?"

"Usage."

"Usage isn't a reason. It's Time's trick for applying the brake to

progress."

He lit up gratefully, waving out the match and hesitating for a spot to

dispose of it. She reached across the table, palm up. "Give me."

He caught her hand.

"Lilly!"

She jerked back with a little clicky catch of breath.

"Don't."

"Lilly, you're maddening! Lilly, can't you see what I haven't the words

to tell you? For years--since that night at the Waldorf--I--I have been

living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play.

Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?"

She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing.

"You don't know what you are saying!"

"I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable

woman in the world--and for me."

She held out his hat and cane.

"My little girl is asleep. Hadn't you better go?"

"That's not fair," he said, taking the hat and cane, but flushing up

furiously.

"I know it isn't. But what is there I can say to you?"

"You can talk it out. Man to man."

"Sit down," she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through

swimming and revealing eyes.

"Now--what is there to say--Bruce--between you and me?"

"Where is he?"

"You know."

"Are matters unchanged?"

She nodded.

"I love you, Lilly."

"And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the

triangle a rectangle."

"You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good God!

women don't martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you

doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out

husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!"

"It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!"

"Mock heroics."

"No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his

respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are

some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations.

Albert Penny and divorce are irreconcilable. Tear his heart out if you

will, but hands off his respectability. It may sound absurd in the face

of the enormity of what I have done to him, but it is a great solace to

me to be able to sacrifice that much to him and to drag him through my

life like a ball and chain. Somehow it seems that I ought to

suffer that."

"Stuff and nonsense! You made your mistake and you had the courage to

tear away from it by the roots. Unless those roots have a drag?"

"No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half

madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity

that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This

mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her?

Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will?

Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe's father doesn't

know that he is a father?"

"Good God!"

"Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better."

"You mean to say you have fought this out alone?"

"He doesn't know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf

her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She's a

beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is

her garden in which to bloom and expand."

"In all these years they don't know your whereabouts?"

"Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and

happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers.

I keep them pretty well under glass. It's all so dreamlike--I've always

been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between

the dream and reality."

He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close.

"Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness."

"All my life I have done that."

"I cannot put you out of my heart now that I have put you in."

"No. No. No." But his embrace had already shaped itself, and, springing

back from it and her own singing of the flesh, she crowded up against

the wistaria-painted screen, shielding it.

"How dared you--here--in this--room! With her!"

"Lilly!"

"Go, please! Go, please!"

"You mean that?"

"You know I do."

He bent low in the attitude of kissing her hand, but without touching

it.

"Forget everything I've said, Lilly, and forgive. We'll go back to the

old. Good night, Lilly! Mrs. Penny."

He must have departed on the balls of his feet, because presently

through the roaring of the silence she heard the door slam without

having been conscious of his passage down the hallway; and then, after a

second, Harry Calvert tiptoeing to her open door to look in with his

light-blue eyes.

She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it.

"Don't," she cried through it--"don't you ever dare do that again,

Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like

that--you--you--frighten--me."

Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest

and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed

finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat's flank, silently, to

save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child's.

Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe's hand crept up, finding

out her mother's cheek.

"Lilly," floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of

consciousness--"Lilly--you're crying. Are--you sad--again?"

"Yes, Zoe--terribly--terribly--"

CHAPTER III

The year that Zoe entered High School, 1914, out of an international sky

of fairly pellucid blue, the thunderclap of world war burst in fury.

It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country

to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs

creeping closer and closer to the edge of everyday life, how little the

complexion of Lilly's routine was changed.

True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze.

The evening after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, she attended a mass

meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an

umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump

in her throat.

The day the Rainbow Division swept up Fifth Avenue in farewell, she

could see the rank and file from the roof of the Forty-second Street

office building, as if the avenue were running a clayey stream, and she

was torn between the ache and the thanksgiving of having no one to give.

But, for the most part, war kept its talons off Lilly. Twice, and as if

his exemption from the draft lay heavily, Harry Calvert had tried to

enlist, his grandmother, with a zeal that was hardly accountable,

exerting every effort toward that end.

It was almost as if war had revived her somewhat fainting faith in

Harry's ultimate justification.

But he was underweight and still in a weakened condition from an

operation for an adenoidal complaint. This last he had undergone before

the war and at Lilly's urgent instance. She had read, in the mass of

books on child hygiene, psychology, and physiology she was constantly

accumulating, the debilitative effects that adenoidal breathing might

exercise upon an entire constitution and mentality.

Poor Harry, and his cancerous predilection for the kind of thievery that

almost invariably stacked up to not even petty larceny! He could

withstand a jewel chest, but not a tool chest. Would steal the robe from

an automobile, provided it was not a luxurious one. Once, when his

grandmother at great difficulty had procured for him a clerkship, he

confiscated the nickel-plated faucets out of the wash room, barely

escaping prosecution. Only the utter triviality of his thievery and the

fight in Mrs. Schum saved him from the law. She was as indomitable in

her protection of him as the granite flesh of rocks.

Quiet, sensitive, with rather a girlish face, slow to beard and quick to

quiver, Harry was invariably liked during the period he held a position,

but month to month saw him from a clerkship in a real-estate office to

window decorator for a retail paper-flower concern, salesman in the

novelty and stationery department of a bookstore, and once in the

children's book section of a department store.

He was rarely apprehended, usually abandoning his position, with his

absurd loot already under cover, and the loss leaking out later, if

at all.

Invariably, as if by way of confession, he brought home to his

grandmother the proceeds from these petty sales, effected by who knows

what device, dropping down into her lap, almost sadly and with a

shrinkage from what was sure to follow, either the few dollars or the

bauble of a bit of jewelry.

She would cry up at him and wring her poor hands, and then he would go

off into his little room adjoining the kitchen, originally intended as

maid's room, and sit with his head down in his hands, back rounded, and

all his throat-constricting capacity for meekness out in his attitude.

And, presently, her sobs subsided, Mrs. Schum would creep in after him,

and behind that closed door there was no telling what long hours of

pleading and abjuration took place. But, next morning, in her little

black bonnet, the rust out in her black dress and the "want ad." sheet

cockily enough beneath her arm, Mrs. Schum would set out with him to

combat, by the decency of her presence, some of the difficulties of

seeking a new position with only one or two time-and thumb-worn

references.

His grandmother's and Lilly's possessions were sacred to him, but every

morning, after the two roomers had departed, Mrs. Schum would tiptoe

after, locking their doors and inserting the keys in her

petticoat pocket.

"I like to keep things locked," she explained to Lilly one day, upon

being intercepted. "You can never tell when a sneak thief will break

into these apartment houses that haven't hall service. I've even heard

of them entering through the fire escape."

"Of course, dear," said Lilly, through heartache for her.

There was an indescribable sweetness in Harry's attitude toward Zoe.

There had been countless long evenings of her little girlhood when no

waiting beside her bedside was too tedious--sometimes during three and

four evenings a week of Lilly's enforced absence in the pursuit of

vaudeville novelties. He was tireless and faithful as a watchdog,

keeping awake by whittling at something no more fantastic than a

clothespin. There were hundreds of them scattered about the house. It

was the sole form his idleness took. He painted heads and eyes on

them--cleverly, too--for Zoe, but as she grew older she began to disdain

them, bullying him in much the fashion her mother had before her.

"I can hop up four steps on one foot," Lilly, with a little catch at her

heart, chanced to overhear on one occasion.

"No, you can't," said Harry, smilingly and a little teasingly.

Catching at her ankle and flinging her curls, she made an unstaggering

and easy ascent of not four, but eight.

"There!" she cried, slapping Harry boldly and resoundingly on the cheek.

"Don't you ever dare say I cannot do what I know I can do."

It left the red print of her little hand, and it was literally as if, as

he looked away from her, he had turned the other cheek.

Almost immediately she caught his hand, placing her warm face to its

back.

"Harry, I'm a devil! I'm sorry. You know I don't mean to be a devil.

Harry! Are you angry? You're not! Please! Be nice, Harry--tell me a

story--Har-ry."

"Once upon a time--" he began, his light-blue eyes almost with the

patient look of the blind.

A little later, there occurred an infinitesimal but telling incident

which served to dissipate whatever growing qualms may have disturbed

Lilly over the rearing of her child in this atmosphere of petty crime.

One evening, while Harry was performing his willing chore of carrying

out for his grandmother the little dinner prepared by Mrs. Schum and

partaken of by Lilly and Zoe at a small card table opened up beside the

window of their room, Zoe announced, with a certain high-handedness with

which Lilly was more and more hard pressed to cope:

"I want my dresses longer. That big red-headed boy in the white jacket

said to me when I went into the drug store over on Columbus Avenue

to-day for some licorice drops: 'That's right. Wear 'em short; you've

got the stems.'"

"What a vulgar, horrid remark!"

"Well, I want my dresses longer."

Lilly regarded her daughter with concern troubling up her eyes.

"Don't ever go into that store again, Zoe. I've a mind to stop in there

myself and talk to the proprietor."

Later that same evening, Harry, with a purpling eye and an opened lip

which he tried vainly to smuggle past his grandmother, crept into his

room. But she was too quick for him, and at her high cry of shock Lilly

rushed into the hallway. There was an utterly alien and vibrating note

of anger in Harry's voice.

"For God's sake, gramaw, be quiet! It's nothing. Had a row with that

red-headed clerk down at the drug store. Took the freshness out of him

for a while."

Lilly tiptoed back to her room. All through a fitful night she woke in

little starts, kissing into the bare white arm of her child as if she

could not have done with the assurance of her safe proximity.

It was less than a month later, and over a year after the adenoidal

operation, that Harry returned home one evening from the real-estate

office with nine dollars and forty cents in his pocket from the proceeds

of the nickel-plated wash-room faucets and several liquid-soap

attachments.

* * * * *

About eight months after Ida Blair's play had lain gathering mold in the

lower drawer of Bruce Visigoth's desk, he sent for Lilly.

Their office relationship since the stuffy June evening over the reading

of the manuscript had been resumed, with invisible joindure. Together

they continued in biweekly conferences to compile the endless cycle of

programs that moved like a chain along the cogs of city to city. There

were nine Enterprise Amusement Theaters now, the newest red-headed pin

on the circuit map as far west as Tulsa, their booking route as yet

independent of any of the larger and recent vaudeville mergers.

It was an office boast and pleasantry that Lilly could recite offhand

through the current program of any of the nine theaters, leaping glibly

from motion picture, to acrobat, and sister acts.

This was hardly true, but her touch at the steering wheel of her

department was sensitive and sure. She could substitute for a

quarantined team of jumping Arabs in Springfield, Illinois, with hardly

more than a sleight of hand through her card index and a telegram or

two. She knew that Memphis would not stand for a pickaninny act, and

that the same was sure fire in Trenton, and was familiar with every

house manager by long-distance-telephone voice. The department was more

and more the well-oiled engine under a light steering hand that Lilly

wielded well and wisely.

Her judgment of the incoming reports of the various house managers, or

a try-out act, although technically subject to Bruce Visigoth's

signature, went usually unchallenged. She virtually was her department,

particularly as the realty aspect of the enterprise came more and more

to assume the proportions of big business. Within her little office of

mahogany appointments she worked with an allotment of stenographers and

clerks. She had an assistant, too; at least, she confiscated him from

the press department--one Leon Greenberg, a young night student from New

York University, with an enormous profile rendered positively

carnivorous of thrust by his struggle up from First Street and Avenue A,

which is mire with a pull to it.

Her own capacity was unnamed. She was probably still down on the books

as stenographer, although at fifty dollars a week now, and it was six

years since she had taken a letter.

It was a gray day in cold and tardy spring when Bruce Visigoth sent for

her--one of those heavy afternoons that darken up at four o'clock and

press thick as gravy against the windows. He was seated at his desk,

hands laced at the back of his head and one foot propped on an open

drawer, his male stenographer typing at the remote corner of a wide and

rather luxuriously appointed office. Except for the green cone of light

over him, the room was plushy with dusk.

"About that play--" he began.

"What play?" she said, seating herself in the entirely easy business

manner she had with him.

"'The Web.'"

Her strong white hand out from its immaculate linen cuff lay unnervously

on the glass top of his desk, but the fingers now began to lift

in rotation.

"Yes?"

"I talked it over with my brother before he returned to Chicago

yesterday. Thought the firm might be interested."

"Yes?"

"He doesn't see it."

"He--wouldn't."

He bent a sliver of ivory paper knife almost double.

"I should have taken this matter up some time ago, but the sudden death

of my sister Pauline's husband, Doctor Enlow--"

"Mrs. Blair understands that."

"And you?"

"Well," she said, looking off and resolutely keeping her smile, "I guess

it means 'The Web' must resume its journey again."

"No, it doesn't."

"Why?"

"It means that I am going to produce it on my own."

She slid to the edge of the chair, her hand closing over the desk edge.

"Oh! Oh!"

"Isn't that what you want?"

"Yes."

"Well, that is my reason."

"You mean you don't see it, either?"

"But you do."

"But--"

"No 'buts.' She goes into rehearsal for a spring try-out in Baltimore,

Stamford, or any of the dog towns. I'm giving the manuscript to Forbes

to read this week. He's the man to direct that type of thing. I'm going

to throw in ten or twenty thousand on your judgment."

"You're serious?" He held out his lean hand. "Ill send for Ida Blair."

"No--please!"

"Why?"

"Sit down."

She did, biting back excitement.

"I don't know how to talk to that little woman. She depresses me. This

is your venture and mine."

"But her play! Its production will mean her resurrection. Her monument

to a memory. Her protest. A chance to get her on her feet. An

opportunity for a home, a background, a reason for living to a woman who

has lost every reason. It's her play and her chance."

"And it is our venture."

"I'm not afraid."

"Are we partners, then?"

"If I had the money, yes, to my limit."

"I don't mean that."

"I do."

"All right; go your limit."

"My limit? How far would six one-hundred-dollar municipal bonds and--"

"Good. I'll sell you six per cent of a twenty-thousand-dollar venture

for the six hundred."

"Six--percent--twenty--thousand--Why, that's not a man-to-man

proposition! You're treating me like a child."

"All right, then; three per cent for the six hundred."

"Done! But no nonsense. If I lose, I lose. Man to man."

"'Man to man,'" he said, clasping her hand and drinking down deep into

her gaze.

And so, when she hurried out to the high ledge to which Ida Blair's

figure had somehow shaped itself as the years went on, she stood for a

moment to steady the hand she placed on that shoulder.

"Ida!" The older woman raised her eyes of the peculiarly washed quality

of gray that has faded from repeated scaldings in hot water. "Mr.

Visigoth wants you in his office, dear--now."

She kept her voice out of quaver, but it had a singing quality like a

plucked violin string.

CHAPTER IV

As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In

her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her

daughter, toward a subject about which she knew nothing, but, in an

inchoate way, felt a great deal.

The New York State fight for woman's suffrage had not yet reached its

victorious culmination, and, reading announcement of a great parade up

Fifth Avenue for a Saturday afternoon, she took Zoe.

The smell of spring was dancingly out. Shop windows bloomed with the

millinery of May. Open street cars, open skies, and openwork shirt

waists had arrived.

They climbed the flank of an omnibus and rode down to the Washington

Arch in a midair snapping with bunting.

It was on one of those irresistible afternoons--radiant with the

sun-washed geometry of three architectural renaissances, a

monastic-fronted fur emporium, a Parthenon of a library, a

Doric-columned bank--that Lilly and Zoe lumbered their omnibus way

through the daily carnival of the most rococo avenue in the world.

There was the flare of a sea gull to Zoe--no containing her. Little

snatches of song bubbled. She was a freshet of delight.

"Look at that tray of violets, Lilly! I must have a bunch."

"Zoe, don't lean over so far!"

"See the yellow satin in that shop window, Lilly! I'd love to wind it

round me. It's like sun!"

"See those jams of women in white, Zoe, waiting to form into line!"

"I'd love to march!"

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know, there--there's something sort of onward about it."

"Exactly! Onward! Forward! March!"

With a precocity that never ceased to amuse and delight Lilly, Zoe,

while only half understanding the content of an occasion, could somehow

imbibe its essence. She leaned now over the rail of the omnibus, the

cross-town streets, as they jogged past, already colloid masses of women

waiting to fall into line.

"Isn't it queer, Lilly, that after all these centuries and centuries

women are just beginning to--what did that woman on the program call it

down at Cooper Union hall the other night--function in the government?

Why has it taken them so long to ask for their half in the say-so

of things?"

"Any great movement, Zoe, must have very slow beginnings. Think for what

ages man lived without Christianity!"

"Yes; but look how long it has been here."

"Reckoning in geology, Zoe, and compared with the age of mountains and

oceans, two thousand years isn't long."

"I think it is."

"You darling!"

They alighted at the Washington Arch, jamming their way into the tight

battalion of spectators already lining both sides of lower Fifth Avenue.

The head of the parade was already forming, a slim young leader holding

in her white mount with difficulty.

"Lilly, she looks like our picture of Jeanne d'Arc when she sees the

vision!"

"She is heeding a vision, Zoe--of to-morrow."

"I feel so--so thrilled, Lilly. Do you?"

"Yes," said Lilly, for some reason breathing hard. "Oh, I do!"

There was a break of music, and all about them women darting into line,

sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the

archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative

frieze of the arch.

At the Eighth Street curb, where they stood, five hundred women, with

standards lifted, stiffened suddenly into formation, a deputy from their

ranks, a buyer, by the way, for the largest cloak-and-suit house in the

world, calling short, quick orders and distributing American flags.

The air was rent with silk and brass; a simoom of rapture raced over

Zoe. She danced on the balls of her feet. It was then that a deputy,

with a face that recalled newspaper reproductions of it, spied her.

"Here, little girl! You! Oh, lovely! Could you manage this banner, dear,

and lead this section? Miss, is this lovely child your sister? Do let

her lead!"

"She's my daughter."

"Come; you may fall in line right behind her. Do you mind if I unpin

your sister's curls? Oh, she's lovely--"

"I said she's my _daughter!_"

"Here, right in front, dear--my--oh, what a find!"

And so, with her somewhat bewildered parent in the ranks behind her, her

little black frock wrapped in a purple-and-yellow banner, head up, eyes

stars, Zoe Penny led the largest district of Greater New York up Fifth

Avenue, a constant and running line of applause following her lead.

She was youth sonnetized. Cameras clicked after her, and, with the

martial music tickling her blood, her head went higher still, like a

stag's. To her mother, following after, it seemed that the loudest of

all must be music within her own heart, and so she marched on, sprayed,

as it were, by the wave of constant applause as it broke over Zoe and

died down at the rank and file.

It was dusk when they reached Fifty-ninth Street, and in the jam of

disbanding and quite a little demonstration over Zoe by the section she

had distinguished, they worked their way out finally toward the

cross-town street car, hand in hand, like two ecstatic, rather

bewildered babes in the wood.

At a touch upon her shoulder Lilly turned, spun, rather, under high

tension, to encounter the well-bred hesitancy of an exceedingly slender

woman, a very small head set on the stem of a long, gracile neck,

something hauntingly familiar in the somewhat heart-shaped face and the

far-apart eyes that were considerably younger than the white hair which

framed them.

"I beg your pardon"--in a voice perfectly rounded of edges--"but my

husband is so enchanted with the little girl that we are taking the

liberty of asking to meet her. Won't you permit me to present my

husband, Gedney Daab? You have heard of him, I presume."

Lilly had. The "Dolorosa" above her desk was a print from a Gedney Daab.

He stepped forward then, lanky and rugged, with a great shock of

upstanding gray hair, with the path of his fingers through it and his

features with no scheme at all. Just very delightfully irregular, he

jutted out of any crowd.

"Zoe, Mr. and Mrs. Daab want to meet you."

She lifted her clean gaze, dropped a courtesy, and held out her hand

with the short, curved gesture of childhood.

"Hello!" he said, the timbre of real youth in his voice, which childhood

is so quick to detect from the silly enameling of tone coated on by

grown-ups for the occasion. "I want to paint you, youngster."

"Oh, Lilly, what fun!"

"Then she is your sister?"

"Oh no, Mrs. Daab; she is my daughter."

"But the name--"

"It's our way together."

"How droll!"

"Do you think I'm pretty?"

Gedney Daab looked down at her ardent artlessness without a burst of

laughter.

"Oh, as little girls go."

"Zoe knows God has merely given her a fair urn of a body, Mr. Daab,

which she, in turn, must fill with beauty of mind and spirit."

"You are the Dolorosa, aren't you?" continued Zoe, turning to Mrs. Daab.

"The sad one with the tears that don't show, from crying on the

inside of you."

It was not until then that this dawned upon Lilly. Those eyes of the

Dolorosa, bleeding tears, were Mrs. Daab's.

"You'll have to paint me as glad--won't you?--glad all over clear from

the inside."

"Yes, Sunlight; I rather think I will."

"Will you permit my husband and me to take you home, Mrs.--"

"Penny."

"Oh, please, Lilly!"

"We live rather far up from here--Ninety-first Street, West."

"And we live at Park Hill; so you see we hardly regard that as far."

They were presently riding through the Park, Zoe facing the three of

them in the soft gray interior of the Daab limousine. She was

absolutely artless.

"I've been in a taxi three times and a hansom once. But I prefer this. I

shall have my own some day--only, purple upholstery instead of

gray--sort of wine color--"

"An early eye to effect, I see, young miss."

"I'm the class beauty," she explained. "I didn't care to be that at

first--Lilly says it is just a lovely accident and might happen to

anyone else. She wanted me to be class president; so I decided to

be both."

"You will observe that my daughter is not chiefly notable for her

reticence."

"You come to my studio, little lady, and I am going to paint you just as

golden and radiantly innocent as you are."

"What is 'radiantly innocent'?"

"Good Lord! I don't know any definition of it except--you."

"Zoe has no innocence in one sense, Mr. Daab. Her real innocence lies in

the fact that life has no ugly secrets from her. She knows the beautiful

from the ugly, and why it is so. I think that is what Mr. Daab means by

'radiant innocence,' Zoe.' Fearless knowledge of truth."

He whistled softly in the gloom.

"Extraordinary!" said Mrs. Daab. "And you are one of us--aren't you,

dear?"

"For suffrage? Oh yes; and I am going to be a real one when I grow up."

"What else are you going to be?"

"A singer."

"You said that as if you meant it."

"I do. I've already heard nine operas. I am allowed to be anything I

want so long as I get to the biggest--the very biggest!"

"Are you studying?"

"I've had piano lessons for five years."

"I'm looking about now for a vocal teacher for her. She may be too

young, but at least I want her voice tried. I--we think she has quite an

amazing range."

"Have you tried Trieste?"

"Oh, I haven't dared contemplate anyone so inaccessible as he."

Mrs. Daab turned her head.

"Gedney," she said, "couldn't you give her a note to Trieste?"

"Good!" he said, feeling for a card and scrawling across its face. "This

will pass you directly to his nibs."

"You couldn't have granted us a bigger favor," said Lilly, feeling her

face glow.

"Then you grant me one. Bring your little girl to my Fifty-ninth Street

studio. I want to paint her."

"Indeed I will!"

"When?"

"Saturday afternoon is our only time."

"Fine. To-day two weeks?"

"Yes."

They Were at Ninety-first Street now, and he saw them up to their door.

"Good-by," he said. "You're a great youngster, and you've picked a great

little mother for yourself. Mrs. Daab and I want you both at the

studio often."

Up in their room, they embraced, Zoe's arms tight about her mother's

neck.

"It's begun, Lilly, to be wonderful!"

"What?"

"Life!"

* * * * *

The Saturday afternoon following, in a brownstone house in West

Forty-sixth Street that was more like a museum of the storied loot of

many lands, Trieste himself opened the pair of Florentine doors,

originally unhinged from a campanile outside of Rome, of his very

private studio, without appointment, to the magic of Gedney Daab's

scrawled card.

He had a head, Lilly decided, like the one of Praxiteles in the St.

Louis Museum of Fine Arts--only, the bust implied young hair, and

Trieste's curls were full of gray and the lines of his face were slashed

deeply. He listened, while Lilly talked her brief preamble, as he

invariably did, with his eyes closed and finger tips touching. Finally,

he opened them, regarding Lilly from under swollen, rather

diabetic lids.

"You should sing," he said, his acquired language grating slightly

against the native one.

"No! No!"

"You are young," he said, running his eyes down her body, "and fine and

big and strong."

She rose as if to throw off the crowding stress of the moment.

"Once," she said; "but that is all over now. My little girl--"

"You have temperament--let me hear," he said, reaching out to the piano

and striking out a bold C. "Sing the scale."

"Please!" she cried, the situation an agony to her. "Not me. My

little--"

"Why, Lilly!" said Zoe, regarding her mother with wide, unaffected eyes.

"Sing the scale, dear."

"Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do"--through a crimson flush.

He seemed to lose interest then, turning to Zoe.

"Let me hear you," he said.

"Shall I sing 'Jocelyn' or 'How Like a Bird'?"

"Anything--something simpler."

"Schubert, then, Zoe."

In her straight frock, with its wide patent-leather belt and flat white

collar, the cascade of her hair down over it, Zoe held the center of the

vast studio, singing straight into her mother's eyes.

It seemed to Lilly, at the sound of that voice, not yet cleared of

childish treble, but as ready to rise as a lark, that every ounce of her

blood must be gushing against her throat; so, after it was finished, she

sat on quite dumbly, staring at the manner in which Trieste remained

sitting with his eyes closed.

"Lyric soprano," he said, finally. "Fine! Big! God-given!"

"_Maestro_--you mean that?"

"Heigh-ho!" he said on a sigh, walking over and placing his hand on

Zoe's curls. "I make up my mind I am seeck of this business. I wait only

for this war to live my day quietly in Capri, where I have my _casa_,

and now a new nightingale flies in at my window. Twice now. Ten years

ago comes Carrienta out of just such a clear sky, and once more, when I

am again sure that one voice is only more unmusical than the rest,

comes this--"

Standing there, Lilly was fighting an impulse to faint. She remembered,

with terror, previous sensations, and fought off the vertigo, biting

down into her lips. She wanted to smile, but her mouth felt numb, as if

it dragged instead of lifted.

"You--you make us very happy--_maestro_."

"Some day," cried Zoe, still thrilling from her effort, "I will sing

until my high C hits the sky!"

'I think you will, _bella mia_, if you have in you the power to work for

it."

"I have."

"Art is the most cruel paymaster in the world. It exacts full

recompense, toil, and heartache before it deals out a first payment

in success."

"I'll pay! I'll pay for what I want, and most of all I want to sing!"

She trilled up a brace of scales for him then, and there were minute

questions of health and habits, and, finally, in a waiting pause, Lilly

found word to ask the question against which her lips stiffened.

"What--are--your terms--_maestro_?"

Something strange happened then, his well-known acumen immediately

asserting itself. It was as if he had slipped into another personality.

"Fifteen dollars a lesson. She must have three a week and her school

work and other studies should be reduced."

"Lilly--we're too poor for that!"

"I--I'm afraid my little girl is right, _maestro_. I--I couldn't even

pay that for all three. I'm employed myself, you see."

"Oh," he said, and walked off to the window, dilly-dallying on his

heels and looking out.

Finally he turned, with a gesture of dismissal.

"I have never before, except Carrienta, done such a thing. It must be a

secret between us. My belief is that art should be as well paid as any

life work, whether it is dentistry or lawmaking or storekeeping. But

your child here--they do not come so every day. In ten years, with

hundreds of pupils each year, she is the greatest since Carrienta. But I

must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her

free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go

out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists.

Good afternoon. Good-by--Zoe"--placing his hands on her curls as if for

their warmth.

In the room adjoining, under whisper of a very soft pedal, some one,

probably a waiting pupil, was playing the indomitable pianoforte

composition, "Melody in F." Staring at her daughter, an old conceit of

Lilly's girlhood came flowing back. It seemed to her that a proscenium

arch of music was forming over Zoe and that her voice, a high-flung

scarf of melody, was winding itself reverently round a star.

* * * * *

That afternoon, Bruce Visigoth again asked Lilly to marry him.

Taking advantage of the quiet of a Saturday afternoon half holiday, she

had returned to the office to clear her desk of an accumulation of

loose ends.

In spite of herself, an extraordinary depression, low as storm clouds,

was gathering over the excitation whipped up by Trieste's acceptance

of Zoe.

The tight squeeze of a lump was gathering in her throat. Finally she

laid her cheek to the desk and cried a little pool of her unaccountable

melancholy on to the glassed surface.

Bruce Visigoth found her so, although, at his entrance, she sprang from

the mound of her misery, violently simulating affairs at a lower drawer.

"Hello!" he cried, then, eying her crumpled cheek and the lane of tears:

"Ah, I say now! Come, come; this won't do. What's up?"

She rubbed her bare hand furiously across the ravages of her sharp

depression.

"Nothing. I--I guess I'm blue," she said, in a half laugh. "Something

wonderful has happened to Zoe, and I--it's made me so happy, I'm blue.

That's it--so--happy--I'm blue."

"What is the wonderful thing?"

She told him.

It was then he caught her hands.

"Lilly, marry me! Make it possible! Don't let the years lead you into a

blind alley. You are bound inevitably to lose a child like Zoe--to life.

That's why you are so unaccountably blue, Lilly; the writing is on

the wall."

"No!" she cried, plunging past him, her hat in hand and her throat now a

cave of the winds for her unreleased sobs. "The years have brought me,

Zoe. She is my fulfillment. You can't frighten me--life cannot take her

from me. I'm not afraid--only, I can't bear anything to-night, least of

all from you--"

"Lilly, you're not--"

"Let me go! I'm all right--only tired--that's all.

Terribly--terribly--tired."

She was presently on her homeward way, walking swiftly, almost, it would

seem, a little madly, through a May evening that hung as thinly as one

thickness of a veil.

At Seventy-second Street she veered suddenly and rather unaccountably

to Riverside Drive and down into a ledge of park that dips like a

terrace to the Hudson River.

An asphalt walk led in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered

couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf

had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be

comprehended from the under side.

At one of the lowermost curves of the walk, the width of a brace of

railroad tracks between, a coal dock jutted out into the river. Across

these forbidden tracks, indeed, as if they did not exist,

Lilly wandered.

At the last inch of dock, so that the water licked up at her shoes,

Lilly stood poised. Not, it is true, with the diver's blade thrust of

arms, but rather the unskilled, the indeterminate movement of one

vaguely prompted from the unfathomable places of the heart.

It was upon that move that something, a terrifying restraint, laid hold

of Lilly's jangling nerve ends.

"Hey there! None o' that to-night!"

A dockman's hand, hairy as an Airedale, had her by the arm, and

somewhere at her brow, cooling it, the fine hand of Bruce Visigoth,

pressing her against him, and at that touch Lilly's hysteria shot up

like a geyser.

"Don't!" she screamed, and would have struggled for the edge except for

the two firm hands now pressing her arms to her sides.

"Lilly, for God's sake, get hold of yourself!"

"Let me go! Let me go!"

"Aw no; we don't leggo. It's a good stroke we both happened to spy you

at the same minute. There's nothin' gives strength like a spell of the

craziness. You'd 'a' jumped me alone, sure!"

"No! No! It wasn't that--God, not that! Tell me, Bruce, it

wasn't--that."

"Of course it wasn't, Lilly."

"That's what they all say once they git their senses jerked back. Come

in here and pull yourself together, girl, or I'll call an ambulance or a

patrol, suiting your pleasure."

"Let me go, you! I won't stand it. I must have been mad! Bruce, you tell

him, please--it wasn't--that!"

"You're wrong, old man. Here--take this for your trouble, but this young

woman is my sister. We walked out here together."

Quieted suddenly to the merest timbre of insolence, the old man shambled

off.

"Sure!" he said, far too knowingly. "Sure!" And faded shaggily,

impudently into darkness.

Bruce Visigoth took Lilly home in a taxicab. At her door she broke her

shamed silence.

"You understand, Bruce, it wasn't anything--like that. It must have been

nerves--tiredness--but nothing, Bruce, that you think it was. That old

man was wrong. You must understand--for her sake--it wasn't that."

"Of course it wasn't, Lilly." His voice drained off, as if from

exhaustion.

But for years, like a wound whose jagged lips were slow to close, the

memory of this night lay palpitating between them.

CHAPTER V

"The Web" was tried out in Baltimore the following April, Zoe, Ida

Blair, and Bruce Visigoth traveling down on the same train with the

company. It cost Lilly a pang for Zoe to miss the two days of school and

a vocal, a French, and a piano lesson, but the theater attracted Zoe

like the blithesome little moth she was. The duties of her High School

combined with the unrelenting tutelage of Treiste molded her young days

pretty rigidly to form, but more than once, during the rehearsals of

"The Web," Lilly, seated in the black maw of the auditorium, would turn

suddenly to the feel of her daughter's gaze burning like sun through

glass into the darkness. The company adopted her as a pet. The director

babied her. Once, as the afternoon rehearsal was disbanding, she crept

up through a box to the stage. The footlights were dark, but she came

down quite freely toward them, seeming to feel their mock blaze, and

sang a snatch or two from the tenderest _Lieder_ ever written, bits of

Schubert and Hugo Wolf, the company gathering in the wings to listen

and applaud.

The incident, slight as it was, brought the scratch of tears to Lilly's

eyes and the pull of half hysteria to her lips. What if, after all, an

incredible fulfillment was gathering about her like a vast dawn? "O

God! please!"

And so, to the unending delight and amusement of Bruce, Zoe went along

to Baltimore, Lilly pinching a little over the expense and pressing out

ribbons and girlish accessories up to the last minute.

With Ida Blair, who had sunk back against years the colorlessness of

cold dish water, herself more colorless, it was as if she had fired her

one and only shot and run retreating behind the explosion.

Already her name had been linked with a co-author on programs and

three-sheets, because a collaborator, a professional mender of plays,

had been called in at the last moment to riddle the drama's somber story

with a few "laughs." A character policeman, a comedy jury foreman, and a

subplot of love story between the character policeman and an Irish cook

had been "written in." The last act entirely revised, a happy ending

substituted, and the theme of the story extricated like a jumping nerve.

It was the heroic treatment administered by experts to save what looked

like unmistakable demise after the first Baltimore performance, and all

the while Ida Blair sat mutely by, trying to probe through the actuality

of her play or what was left of it, actually in the acting.

"The Steel Trap," as it was renamed, played to indifferent reviews and

receipts the remainder of the Baltimore engagement, and lost money in

Washington, but to the director, Bruce Visigoth, and certainly to Lilly,

looked a potential property.

So after two weeks the play was removed, revamped, recast, still another

play diagnostician called in, and under his surgery the third and fourth

acts combined, and the original role of love story made to predominate

what sociological note the play still contained. After an October tryout

in Stamford and a New York opening of still doubtful reception, when the

production hung between life and death and all the well-known

exigencies of oxygen were applied in the form of "papering" the house

with two weeks of free tickets, press-agenting, _et al._, the public

decided to like it.

"Who Did It?" as it was re-renamed, settled down to a run of forty-three

New York weeks, and along the Rialto the source of its authorship leaked

out and became curbstone, and finally newspaper, patter.

At the end of six months Ida Blair had resigned her bookkeepership,

erected a small but perfect plinth of blue granite in a certain hillside

cemetery, purchased a story-and-a-half bungalow in the heart of two Long

Island acres, and was raising leghorns and educating a niece

by marriage.

For the forty-three metropolitan weeks, not to mention stock, foreign,

motion pictures, and road incomes that were to accrue later, Lilly was

receiving her share, never less than one hundred and twenty-five dollars

a week and often considerably more.

It was a windfall pure and simple. The years of petty pickering suddenly

seemed more horrid to her in retrospect than she had ever realized they

were in the living. It was hateful to have reckoned in car fares and to

so often have appeared to do the niggardly thing before the unspoken

reproach of her child.

That same winter a cashier's note with her weekly check announced a

thirty-three and a third per cent advance in salary. Life had suddenly

quickened its tempo. She was passing through one of those eras when

events, long crouched, seem to spring simultaneously.

* * * * *

In April, 1917, the United States declared war against Germany. Daily

life, even to the indirectly touched, took on a new throb. Fourteen men

employees of the Amusement Enterprise Company enlisted the first week.

A service flag went up. Bruce Visigoth, outside the draft limit,

immediately enrolled on a service committee, spending two days out of

every week in Washington. Vaudeville ranks sagged suddenly and for a

brief moment the gray-haired actor came back into his own. Office

tension tightened. A nervousness set in. A telephone ringing could set

Lilly's nerves to quivering and the telephone not ringing fill her with

a nameless sort of anxiety.

More and more, too, it seemed to her, with the emotions always just a

scratch beneath the surface those war times, that the agony of pretense

between her and Bruce Visigoth could not endure. That he had applied for

a commission in active service Lilly knew, but merely from

correspondence. There had been no talk about it. She awoke nights, heavy

with a dread she could not name.

Only the violent conjuring of her child and a vision of Albert Penny

carried her rebellion past these bad places. Their frequent enforced

conferences; the chance touching of their fingers, only to fly too

instantly apart; the impeccable masks of indifference and elaborate

casualness of manner; the forbidden singing through her entire being as

he walked into the office and the imperturbability of the manner she

must present to him. To contemplate a future futile with such dreary

repetition became almost more than she could bear, and bitter with that

salt were the lonely tears she cried at night.

Even the occasional appearance of Robert Visigoth came more and more to

be a sort of biting irritant to a gangrenous spot she thought long since

had hardened.

He had grown enormously fat and Rufus G. Higginbothom, dying, had

enhanced that glutted look by bequeathing to his only daughter, Hindle,

without stipulation, a leaf-lard fortune of some seventeen

million dollars.

When his daughter, Pauline, was thirteen, he brought her to New York on

one of his frequent fliers, parading the fat, freckled, and frightened

youngster from one department to another.

"How much do you think she weighs?" he was fond of interrogating, with

his small parental eyes full of pride. "Hundred and thirty-six for

thirteen years. Not bad, eh?"

With about the sickest sensation she was ever to know, Lilly saw him

this day lead his daughter past her open door, his face averted and the

roll of fat at the back of his neck redly conscious.

It was after this incident that a half plan, long dormant, lifted its

head. Every day in her comings and goings through the wide fireproof

corridors of the Forty-second Street building a sign on a ground-glass

door waved at her like a flag:

MISS NELLIE TERRY

Playbroker

Authors'

Manuscripts

Placed

She had little doubt of her ability to launch out into a scheme of this

sort for herself and liked to incubate the idea in the back of her head,

going so far as to inspect a tiny office on the fifteenth floor,

mentally furnishing it up, and visualizing her name in neat black

letters on her own ground-glass door.

She did broach the subject to Zoe one evening, who, with her head

wrapped in a brilliant fez improvised out of an old cushion top, stood

before the mirror, attitudinizing her part in school entertainment.

"No! Don't go into anything tin horn like that! I hate for you to keep

playing _second fiddle._"

In the pause that followed, hardly perceptible enough to hold the drop

of a pin, Zoe flashed toward her mother, the colossal ego of her youth

somehow penetrated for the moment.

"Why, Lilly--I--I mean--You know what I mean--"

"Of course I know what you mean, dear. Second fiddle!"

And so what with Zoe's growing demands and Lilly's rooted fear of any

jeopardy to them, time marched on rather imperceptibly, except that

Lilly thinned and whitened a bit, slendering down, as it were, to more

and more sisterly proportions as her daughter shot up to meet her. They

were shoulder to shoulder now, if the truth were known, Zoe a little in

the preponderance.

Meanwhile, Zoe was growing restive of the somewhat irksome limitations

of the Ninety-first Street apartment. She complained that the room was

oppressive for her long hours of study and practice. Visits to the Daab

studio, faithful in effect to a Doge's palace and where she was more and

more a favorite, and also to the pretentious homes of one or two school

companions, had an upsetting effect upon her. The long, gloomy neck of

hallway depressed her and she voiced bitterly a secret aversion of

Lilly's for the single bathroom with the ugly wooden floor and shallow

bathtub. "Dump" she called the little flat, her brilliant blue gaze

blackening up.

"I can't have the girls and boys visit me in this little two-by-four,

dear. It's a dump!"

And so early in the run of "Who Did It?" the little group moved again.

This time to a strictly modern, pretentious apartment in West End

Avenue, whose upper apartments boasted a river view and three baths and

rented as high as four and five thousand dollars a year.

For twelve hundred Lilly obtained the ground-floor rear, no view, but

five fairly large rooms and two capacious baths. And since such a house

takes its tone from its highest-priced tenants, they enjoyed with them

the uniformed hall service, the ornate entrance _de luxe_ and foyer

_de trop_.

In lieu of maid, Harry again occupied those quarters, his grandmother

sleeping on a davenport in the sitting-dining-room. There were no

roomers, Lilly carrying the resultant deficit.

She and Zoe again shared what corresponded to the parlor, this time a

fairly large room, with alcove curtained off for sleeping quarters. They

furnished it themselves, quite charmingly, too, and with a consensus of

taste except where Lilly gave way to Zoe's really superior intuition.

There were plain écru walls, not papered, but, at Zoe's instance,

painted and roughened up with a process called "stippling." The two-tone

brown rug. An overstuffed couch of generous proportions and upholstered

in a nicely woven imitation of Flemish tapestry. Along the back of this

piece, which occupied virtually the center of the room, was a long,

narrow table the exact length of the couch, with a pair of Italian

polychrome candlesticks, gift of Gedney Daab, at either end.

A piece of old red brocade hung over the fireplace, covering the ugly

mirror, and facing it a brown-rep fireside chair, coarse tan fishnet

curtains, a pair of huge black-velvet floor cushions with orange-colored

balls in each center, bespeaking a new art era which was dawning as

colorfully and as formlessly as a pricked egg yolk.

An upright piano was stacked with music, and, in spite of Lilly's

argument for them, no pictures on the walls, only a brilliant panel

portrait of Zoe, signed Gedney Daab, her young form in faint profile

against a background of cloth of gold, the face up-flung to a flow of

sunlight that crossed the picture in a churchy ray.

"If we cannot have originals or etchings, we won't have any. I hate

middle-classness."

"But, Zoe, dear--a few good prints. 'The Age of Innocence'--"

She kissed her mother on the mouth with all the outrageous patronage of

youth.

"You're a darling, Lilly, but they just aren't doing it that way any

more, dear."

So there were no pictures.

At the time of this move, Harry had been holding the position of clerk

at the cigar, magazine, and book concession of one of the newest and

noisiest of Broadway's terrific commercial hotels.

The hours were difficult, from noon to midnight, but within the

seventeen months he had advanced from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a

week. A new, a surprising spruceness had laid hold of him. He took to

exceedingly tall small collars and vivid neckwear, his suit very narrow

and making him look less than ever his years.

Mrs. Schum, too, had taken on some of that well-being, and, though she

complained constantly of a sciatic twist in her side, something had

lifted from off her. Her patter about the house, in the slippers with

the rubber insets, was lighter; she discarded the old jet-edged dolman

with the humps on the shoulders and the slits for the arms, for a decent

full-length black coat with a stitched braid border and self-covered

buttons, gift of her grandson. There had been a present for Lilly, too,

a light-blue, drugstore-purchased celluloid toilet set.

He no longer sat idle in his room, his light eyes futile with staring at

space or his head down tiredly in his hands. Something had indeed come

over Harry.

"After all," said Lilly, always readily buoyed, "the operation did

accomplish!"

Sometimes, since his mornings were free, he rode down to the office with

Lilly, eagerly insistent to pay her car fare and cram a return Subway

ticket into the warm pink aperture of flesh where her glove clasped.

Once he bought her a little spray of heather off a vender's tray.

"Harry, you mustn't spend on me this way. You must begin to save your

money for that right girl when she comes along."

Never quick with retort, he stood watching her dart into the foyer of

the Forty-second Street building, a sudden silence shaping around him

that had in it the little noises of birds singing. "Right girl," he kept

repeating after her, or something like that, and remained there

loitering for twenty minutes after her presence had fluttered through

the revolving doors and into the elevator.

And then suddenly a quick succession of events set in.

One night Lilly and Zoe, returning from a Boston Symphony concert for

which they held first-balcony season seats, found Harry trying to pour

brandy between the clenched lips of Mrs. Schum, who lay rigid on the

hall floor where she had fallen, her head bleeding from a sharp contact

with the door.

Her poor face with the shriveled bags of flesh seemed suddenly shrunk,

and, holding the flask against her teeth, Harry's hands were trembling

so that the liquid poured in a thin stream off the edge of her mouth.

After half an hour of desperate and unavailing use of home remedies,

Lilly sent for a doctor, one in the building, who came down in

dinner clothes.

At twelve o'clock that night Mrs. Schum, without regaining

consciousness, was rushed to the Saint Genevieve Hospital in East

Seventy-eighth Street, for an emergency operation that had to do with a

growth in her side.

It was Lilly's first contact with the casualty of sudden illness. In the

little anteroom of the hospital, her hand in Harry's, she sat the

remainder of the night through. He was constantly wiping away the tears

from his light eyes and looking away to gulp. She reassured him where

she could, tightening her hold of his hand.

"Don't--let them hurt her."

"They aren't hurting her, Harry dear. She can't feel at all under the

anaesthetic."

"But they won't know. Gramaw won't let them know. Tell them, Lilly,

she's that way--not to hurt her--please."

"Harry--dear!"

At dawn milk wagons began to clatter through streets no grayer than

Harry's face. But at six o'clock Mrs. Schum was reported "as well as

could be expected" and the operation apparently a success.

They rode home through the early morning, Lilly insisting upon a taxicab

and Harry lying back, quite frankly spent, against her arm. Her vitality

was unquenchable, mounted, in fact, under stress. Untired, she brewed

him hot coffee, forced him to drink it and lie down; tidied up the

little flat there at six-thirty o'clock in the morning, with a

hit-and-a-miss it is true, but allaying all signs of confusion; fluted

an Eton collar for Zoe and packed her off to school; and at half after

eight, just out of a cold and invigorating shower, was combing out the

fine electric rush of her hair, a pink Turkish bathrobe, the color of

her firm, cool skin, wrapped tightly about her and caught in by a cord

at her waist line.

Suddenly through the mirror she saw the door open, and before she could

call out, Harry stood in the center of the room, his eyes running quite

unmistakably over the contour of her sheathed body.

It was the first time he had ever violated the slightest nicety, and,

outraged even in her pity for him, her hand flew up, drawing the robe

closer at her breast.

"Don't come in!" she cried, retreating up against the dresser and

turning her shoulder with the hair flowing over it toward him. "How

dared you come in here without knocking! Go!"