He was crying, not seeming to know it, because he continued, even as she

stood blazing at him, to stand staring through the rain of tears.

"Harry, you're forgetting yourself. You mustn't give way. Your

grandmother is over the worst now--"

Suddenly he was on his knees, his back round and shaken with sobs.

"Lilly--Lilly--can't you see?"

"See what? Is anything wrong? Harry," she cried, stooping to shake him

by the shoulder, "has anything happened again? Are you in trouble?"

He would not rise, following her, to her horror, by walking on his

knees, pressing and pressing the hem of her garments, and before she

realized it burning his kisses down into it. She fought him off, tearing

from his grasp and staggering back against the wall.

"Harry--you're in trouble again."

He caught her bare arm, pressing his lips into the yielding flesh.

"Lilly, I can't hold back any longer. I love you. I'm all alone. With

gramaw here I could hold back--somehow--but now--Lilly--Lilly--I

love you."

She could only stare, her mouth fallen open and the rim of her eyes

their widest.

"It's been so long to--hold back--so long. Since that first day at the

street car--you kissed me--and now with gramaw gone--Lilly--"

She jerked him up from his knees this time, holding him firmly, even

absurdly, by the coat lapels, shaking him.

"Harry, you've gone mad!"

"I love you, Lilly. All these years. I'm all alone now and--"

Her glance shot to the egress of the door, but, seeing that he

anticipated her, she did not dart, but held herself back from him, her

hands in an X across her breast.

"Harry," she said, trying to keep out of her voice a rising sense of

fear, "you're not well You don't know what you are saying or doing."

"You treat me like a child, but I'm a man. Your age! You hear--a man

with a man's feelings for a woman--for you--Lilly. You're my--be my--"

"You get out," she cried, her terror bursting out like a flame. "Get out

or I'll call Mr. Alquist."

She referred to the superintendent of the apartment building, although

she knew him to be well out of hearing. It is probable that Harry knew,

too, because he had her by the elbows, pressing them in against her body

and her hair flowing across his face.

"Lilly, Lilly, Lilly!" he kept repeating, breathing so heavily it

sickened her to hear and feel it, and all the time fumbling with his

free hand down into his waistcoat pocket, bringing up a bit of tissue

paper which he tore at with his teeth, revealing the icy flash of a

great oval diamond ring set up high in platinum. "It's yours, Lilly. I

want to cover you with them. I want you to blaze with them--"

He pressed it on her finger, pushing it down the entire length, danced

her hand before her, catching her to him finally and crushing her and

the flow of her hair to him, kissing so fiercely down that red marks

came out against her whiteness, and when her cry finally rose to a

shriek let go of her, staggering back, his face, never quite clean of

pimples, suddenly fat-looking and with a lionlike thickening up of

the features.

"Ah--yah--yah--yah--yah!"

His incoherence was horrible and she began to sob at him through

hysteria.

"You go! You get out! You stole that ring! You're a thief! You stole

that ring!" she cried, thrusting it with a sudden quick hand down the V

of his waistcoat. "Get out! Get out! Your grandmother--your--" Then,

because words failed and her knees threatened to give way, she snatched

up a book from the table, standing quivering and in the attitude

of hurling.

He did go then, as if the book had actually struck, making a detour of

her and his knees quite bent as he walked.

She finished her dressing in quick, fuddled movements, voice out in her

breathing, buttoning up wrong and tearing open again in the grip of a

nervous frenzy.

A panicky need to gain the outdoors seized her; air to sweep and somehow

to cleanse her.

Before she was quite dressed, her belt not yet adjusted, in fact, the

bell rang in three titters and a prolonged grill. She stood arrested,

for some reason beginning all over her trembling. When Harry did not

answer she went out herself, opening the door to a mere slit. A foot was

pushed immediately in, crowding her back against the wall. Two men

walked in, without removing derby hats, and at sight of them the

nameless terror pinned her there in silence.

"Harry Calvert live here?"

She stood with her answer locked in her throat, conscious, on the

moment, of Harry appearing in the kitchen doorway behind her. She

wanted, for the same nameless reason, to motion him back, to shriek out

a warning, to throw herself against his presence. To herself in quick

repetitions:

"O God, make him go back!"

"Harry Calvert?"

"Yes," replied Harry from where he stood.

"Warrant for your arrest. Charged with entering the apartment of Mrs. J.

King at Hotel Admiral and stealing one four-carat diamond ring valued

at five thousand dollars. More evidence than we know what to do with.

You better come quietly."

"Harry, deny it! They've made a mistake! You haven't the right to come

here at a time like this. There is sickness. His grandmother is dying at

a hospital. You've made a mistake. Take me. I'll appear for him. I'll

give his bail. All you want. Deny it, Harry. Harry!"

For answer a sharp explosion rang suddenly into the narrow hallway,

banging and reverberating against the walls, crowding faces out behind

an immediate purplish smoke.

"Harry! Harry! My God! Harry!"

He crumpled up quietly, one shoulder in the lead and his left leg

bending under him, straightening out then, with half a writhe to

his back.

"No! No! Help him! God! No! No! No!"

But yes. Harry had shot himself, very truly, too, through the heart.

CHAPTER VI

There followed black weeks, with Mrs. Schum lying there on the edge of

death, yet reluctant to go, Lilly's days an intricate pattern of

hospital, office, and home.

She was more tired than she knew and for days after the tragedy went

about with a springy little sob just behind her throat, which was

perpetually taut from holding back tears.

The effect upon Zoe was telling. She whose solicitude for her mother had

never been any too noteworthy and who with all the unthinking blitheness

of an unthinking childhood had taken much for granted, developed,

suddenly, a new consciousness.

She would literally drag Lilly away from the pressing board.

"Don't, Lilly. I'm old enough to iron out my own ribbons." Or: "Don't

polish my shoes, Lilly. It's outrageous!"

"But, Zoe, I would rather you put the time on practicing or reading."

"I can do both."

One Saturday morning she was even awakened to an aroma of coffee, her

daughter standing attendant at the bedside with a tray of steaming

breakfast.

"Stay in bed this morning, Lilly. You look fagged. Let me take a message

down to Visi for you. Oh, Lilly, do! I'll wear my new red tam."

"Nonsense! I'm going down as usual."

"But, Lilly, I want him to see me in it."

Probably Lilly regarded her daughter a second longer than the occasion

warranted, because Zoe broke away from the gaze somewhat redly.

"Faugh! I hate him. He reminds me of a wild horse. But I'll show him

some day that I'm on earth. I'm as full of my own ideals as he is

of his."

"Of course you are, dear; but why so angry?"

"I'm not."

Then Lilly rose, smiling as she dressed.

The household was not easy of readjustment until finally were procured

the services of one of the charwomen from the Bronx Theater, who

prepared the meals and could flute Zoe's collars to the utmost delicacy.

At this time Zoe was an advanced junior in High School, president of her

class, although the hawklike tutelage of Cleofant Trieste had delayed

graduation for a year, slowing down her curriculum to meet his demands

of harmony, languages, rhythmic dancing, and sports. She had a long,

sure swimming stroke that could carry her again her length, rode with

the fine fluid movement of a young body at one with her mount, and

because of her five hours a week at gymnasium excelled in the rather

uncommon sport of handball.

She no longer wore her hair in its great avalanche of curls down her

back; they were caught in now with an amber barrette. Nights Lilly loved

to brush them out until they flared to a dust of gold about her head.

There was no light too dull for this hair to catch. It sprang out in

radiance against any background.

"When you sing Marguerite, Zoe, you won't need a wig."

"Ah, but when I sing Electra--Thaïs--the real me--no namby-pamby

Marguerite--no pearls--that's how I feel about Thaïs--as if she were a

great opal full of fire. Hair," flopping her head backward with a bounce

of curls, "is hot--it restricts. These curls--they are all hot and

crawly around my neck, holding me."

"Poor Harry! You remember how he used to love to take you out walking to

show off your curls?"

"Lilly, is Mrs. Schum going to get well?"

"I don't know. It frightens me. I cannot bear to look ahead for her,

poor dear."

"If she gets well she'll have to know, won't she, that Harry didn't go

to war?"

"Yes, and somehow--I couldn't stand her knowing that."

"She'll know it some day, anyhow."

"Yes, but then maybe where it will be easier for her to understand."

On her own responsibility Lilly had employed this subterfuge with Mrs.

Schum. Slowly as she came clutching back at consciousness, the name of

her grandson more and more on her twisted lips, Lilly whispered it down

to her, closing her hand over the tired old bony one.

"Listen, dear Mrs. Schum, I've--news for you."

"They're all against him--"

"No, no, dear. While you've been so ill, what we had hoped for has

happened. Harry's been accepted, dear--he's enlisted."

She crinkled her brow, trying to understand.

"They wouldn't take him. He wanted to fight for his country. They were

all against him--"

"No, no, dear. It's all different now. Since our country is at war Harry

has been accepted. The boys were rushed overnight to training camp.

Thousands of them. He came weeks ago to tell you good-by, but you were

too ill to know. He's on a transport now, dear, sailing to fight for his

country. Aren't you proud? Aren't we all proud?"

The poor hands began to tremble, feeling their way up along Lilly's arm.

"Harry's gone--to war?"

"Y-yes--dear."

She seemed to speak then, through a pale transparent sleep, into which a

new contentment pressed lightly.

"Harry's gone. Annie, he's a soldier. He's so gentle with me, Annie, a

meek child, like you were. Never any back talk or a harsh word. Whatever

wrong he did was forced on him by those working against him. They were

all against him. His Mamma-Annie knows. She bore him and I raised him.

Fight, Harry! The streak from your father can't keep you down. Show

them, Harry, show them. Whatever wrong my boy did was forced on him by

those working against him--"

"That's all past now, dear."

"He liked you, Lilly. He'd have gone through fire for you. You were

always good to my soldier boy. I was forever finding old bits of things

that you had thrown away among his belongings. Don't tell him I told

you. Old pencils and old gloves. He was a great one for gathering up

things for keepsakes after you had thrown them away. Gloves--found some

old ones of yours under his pillow one morning. Not taking things, you

understand, but just pulled out of the rubbish heap for remembrance."

"I do understand, dear."

And so the weeks of her illness and of Lilly's deception dragged on.

There were holes in the fabric of the story, obvious to any but Mrs.

Schum's tired consciousness, and a too sudden inquiry could throw Lilly

off her guard, but there was a flag with one shining service star

glowing above the narrow bed, and evenings straight from the office

Lilly would hasten to the hospital with fruits that could only be looked

at, and newspapers to be unfurled and read.

"Is his name in the papers yet?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

"I--You see, dear, the transport has just reached the other side."

"My boy will show them--"

The kindly spirit of the deception had fallen over the entire corridor.

A maternity case in the room adjoining sent in a silk flag with

hand-embroidered stars. The head nurse, herself on the eve of sailing

for service, had shopped the flag with the one bright star. The doctor,

fathering the lie, called her "captain" and saluted her upon entering

the room with a flash of palm and a click of heels.

She could smile at this, but with lips as blue and shriveled as drowned

flesh.

One night after she had dozed off and wandered into some phantasmagoria

where she seemed to fancy herself seated in the bow of a boat with her

daughter, she opened her eyes suddenly, reaching out for Lilly's hand.

"Lilly, your poor mother. Do you ever think of her?"

"Yes, yes, I do, dear."

"You remember, Lilly, how she used to rush down right from the breakfast

table to the bargain bins for those pink and blue mill-ends she used to

dress you so pretty in. My! wasn't she one for Valenciennes lace,

though! Wouldn't she just dress Zoe up, though--"

"Wouldn't she!"

"She was a good woman in her way, Lilly, even with all her fussing and

nagging. My! how she did used to nag! I understood her. The ketchup. She

was a great one for condiments and would have them all over the other

boarders. Ketchup and the best cut of the meat for you and your father.

There was just no pleasing her. But I understood her--she's a good

woman, Lilly."

"Indeed, mamma is good!"

"It's not that I don't glory in you, Lilly, and your having a wonder

child. You know I've always gloried in you. You've a head on you I

always say that's going to carry you beyond us all, but don't you ever

feel, Lilly, that maybe your doings have been wayward?"

"I do. I do."

"Your mother. Your father, as patient and as fine a man as breathed.

Your husband, I don't know him, but life is so short. So terribly short.

So full of pain and regrets for what can't be undone. That's why I

cannot go and leave my boy behind--to suffer alone. I want him to go

first. He's not strong. What is life, except doing for those we love?

Don't you ever feel that about them out there, Lilly? Life is so

short--such a struggle--alone--"

"Dear Mrs. Schum, you--you--you're right."

"Ah, I know---the young man in the box with you at 'The Web' that night

it opened. Your boss. I know! He likes you, that young man does, Lilly.

It's easy to see it in his eyes for you. That's why it's dangerous.

Harry likes you, too--but not that way, I think. He saves your old

gloves. That's always struck me as funny. They're all against him. The

fire escapes; that's why I lock the doors. You hear--the fire escapes.

Poor Lilly! just a little too much ambition and not quite enough talent

to reach. I used to predict for you all the things that are cropping out

in your child. Zoe is to be the one, Lilly. Not you--or Harry--or

Mamma-Annie--Zoe! Funny his saving your gloves--"

These were the times that Lilly would sit there crying, old musty

memories rising around her like kicked-up dust. There were whole

evenings when her mother's name was constantly on the not always

coherent lips, and to Lilly the old sense of the unreality of her

universe, or was it herself, laid somewhat, by the busy years, would

come surging again. Where were the visions for which she had climbed,

spike-shod, up that loving wall of living flesh back there? How long

since her last dream of self had vanished? Zoe was her answer.

One evening when Lilly arrived home from the hospital she found Zoe

squatting in bed, her face naughtily screwed into a little grimalkin

knot, elbows pressed into her sides, palms up, and all attitudinized to

emulate a Chinese god. Holding this pose for a full minute after Lilly

had entered the room, she began to bounce in hilarity up and down on the

mattress, probably to allay her own sense of inner unease.

For the full round of the minute Lilly stared, her glance widening and

darkening. Something had happened to Zoe. Something horrid.

"Don't you love it, Lilly? Don't stand there like you're frozen.

Everybody loves it. All the models down at Daab's are wearing it this

way. Thaïs does. Jeanne d'Arc does. Don't look at me that way."

Zoe had bobbed her hair. It hung quite straight, and in an outstanding

shock, because of its thickness, just below her ears. Franz Hals would

have loved the rectilinear contour of her. She was saucy. She was

abbreviated. She was naughty; and liked to flop her head about for the

soft throw of her hair.

Her mother dropped rather than sat on a chair edge, trying to keep down

the storm of anger that had her by the throat and eyeballs.

"Your curls! All gone! Your beautiful hair! What have you done? You

wicked girl! You--wicked--girl--you!"

It was the first time in all the largesse of her youth that such a tone

had assailed Zoe. The very seventeenness of her revolted; she dropped

her attitude.

"Why, Lilly--you--you're talking like other--mothers."

But the spank in Lilly's hand was suddenly singing against her palm and

there was a rush of her not so forbearing forefathers to the very front.

"You horrid girl! How dared you? Don't come near me! Your beautiful hair

that I've never been too tired to brush for hours! To have realized

those gorgeous curls in you and for--for this! You horrid, selfish

girl--selfish--selfish!"

All during this, her naughtiness fallen from her like a cloak, Zoe sat

regarding her parent, her lower lip less and less steady. She might have

been stunned, trying to keep her equilibrium by a series of rapid little

blinks, Lilly meanwhile sunk into a heap and crying down into her hands.

"Lilly--dearest--darling--est--"

"Don't talk to me."

"But, Lilly--you--you've always wanted me to be true to myself."

"You're not true to yourself. You're true to a pose, a silly fad that

you've picked up around the Daab studio."

"You always said if I wanted to be a circus rider I could, just so I was

better than all the other circus riders. Well, I wanted to have my hair

bobbed and I bobbed it bobbiest."

"Your comparison is stupid. You know it is. You've never taken a step

before without talking it over with me. You know perfectly well I should

not have interfered. I should have tried to make you see the folly of

cutting off your beautiful curls, but if you had still insisted, off

they might have come just the same. I think it is that as much as the

loss of the curls. Your privilege has become a license. You've made

everything seem ridiculous--me--you."

"Then you've made me so. If you want me to be like other girls you

should have reared me like other girls. Have other girls' fathers who

don't know they are on earth? Have other girls' mothers who--"

"Zoe!"

As if the words had been live coals scuttling off her lips before she

knew, Zoe sat back, staring at her mother's stare, scalding tears

already welling.

"Lilly, forgive me. I--I wish I could cut my tongue out. I didn't mean

it that way; you know I didn't. If you don't forgive me I can't stand

it," the stabbing consciousness of that impulsively flung reproach

already through her like a hurting wound.

"You are right, Zoe, I--"

"I didn't mean one word, Lilly darling, not one eeny word. It's just

that all of a sudden it seemed to me to be the freest, gladdest thing in

the world to cut off my hair. That's it, free! Haven't you ever had

that feeling, darling? Free! I wouldn't have done it, Lilly, if I had

known how it would hurt. Lilly--darling--mother. If I've hurt you I want

to just die. My own dear--Lilly--"

Her voice caught on the crest of a sob and she was at her mother's feet,

seeking out her lap, tears rushing down over her incoherence.

"I'll grow it back again for you, Lilly. I'll make it up to you,

sweetheart. I didn't mean that--what I said about fathers or--or other

girls--you know I didn't. I'm bad. Terrible."

In some alarm, Lilly placed her hand on the shorn head, shuddering in

spite of herself as if the ends were bleeding.

"Sh-h-h, Zoe! It upset me, dear, that's all--the shock of seeing you

sitting up in bed there--with it off."

"I'll make it up to you, Lilly. In so many ways. Soon. It's settled,

dear, that Auchinloss is coming to America in the fall to conduct.

Trieste is going to arrange my audition for September. He promised

to-day I'd be ready. Think, Lilly, my audition so soon. I'll have the

wig made out of my own hair, dear, for Marguerite. Don't feel badly,

Lilly; the wig will look--"

"I don't any more, Zoe. It was just the shock--"

"I know it was silly, dear, but it will grow quickly and I just had that

feeling to be free--you see, dear--"

"I do see, dear, I do. Zoe, look at me. Doesn't it ever come over you,

on the eve of so much, dear--that perhaps you do need his--your

father's guardianship--"

"Now just because I said _that_. I tell you I'm a devil. I didn't mean

it--not one word--"

"I know you didn't. It cropped out unconsciously. You're not to blame.

He's a good man, Zoe, your father, and his steady hand might do much

where I--may have failed."

"If you talk that way I can't stand it. You tell me so often he's a good

man, I wonder if he really is--"

"You're getting beyond me, Zoe. I wonder if the day isn't inevitable

when you are going to break out more and more into unconscious

reproach."

"Lilly--no--no--"

"Oh, I don't only mean what you said just now. But it's on my mind more

and more, now that you are old enough to decide for yourself. You cannot

be sucked back any more into a life you would not tolerate. You can

choose. That is what I have been waiting for. Doesn't the ache ever come

over you, Zoe, to see your father? Just a natural instinctive ache, if

nothing else--your grandparents--"

"No! No! No! I hate it all as you hated it. If you want to punish me

terribly--for saying something I didn't mean--just talk them to me. I

want wideness, must have it! Room! I--I could say it in music better

than in words. Some day I shall compose a song that says it for

me--the--the way I feel it. Don't stop now saving me from them. Wait.

Wait, Lilly, until I sing. Trieste understands even better than you. I'm

the surprise he keeps hinting about to everyone. I'm going to bowl them

over at my audition. Lilly--have I ever failed you? Have I ever come in

second for you? No, and I never will. You won't ever be sorry, Lilly--on

my account. You won't even care that I've cut off my hair. Lilly dear,

do you believe me? I'm always going to come in first for you. First!"

"I do, dear, I do."

And of course in the end they sobbed together, and lay far into the

dawn, cheek to cheek, until finally Zoe dropped off to sleep and Lilly

lay wide-eyed beside her, the perfume of her child's soft breathing

against her cheek.

The next morning in the reading room of the Public Library a notice

catapulted itself at Lilly from the second page of the St. Louis

Globe-Democrat:

L.H. Hines, president, and Albert Penny, vice president of Slocum-Hines

Hardware Company, leave shortly for Washington, where they have been

called to give expert advice upon installing American Canteen Service.

CHAPTER VII

The day that followed seemed to Lilly vague with a sort of fog. A

disturbing something lay against her consciousness and one of her

unquiet nights was filled with the unaccountable crying. But morning

invariably brought back reality and her workaday could envelop her

busily, even happily.

Meanwhile, war, like a spreading wing, had blackened against the

international sky. Somme, Vimy Ridge, Aisne had been bled, and more than

ever the streets that led toward the embarkation points were the color

of khaki, women frequently running alongside, crying and laughing

bewildered farewells.

Some of this war hysteria, of which she was really no integral part,

had, however, hold of Lilly. Her throat ached with it. Her state cropped

out in her work. One afternoon she traveled to Newark for the purpose of

seeing a Japanese sleight-of-hand act, and came away without sufficient

impression of any kind to pass judgment.

Bruce Visigoth eyed her closely.

"You're tired," he said, commenting upon her failure to turn in the

report. "You need a rest."

"No," she said, "it's just--a little of everything--I guess--then Harry

Calvert--that was a shock, you see, and now his grandmother. I'm with

her at the hospital every evening--and then this war--this futile

bleeding--horror."

He could never, with her, keep his tone as level as his manner.

"Lilly," he burst out, "drop it all for a couple of weeks. You and the

youngster come out to the place in Tarrytown. There are some things I

want to talk over with you. I'm working now to obtain the rights to that

little beauty from the Spanish you gave me to read. I'm going to produce

after this war mess slows down. It is the exquisite kind of thing I'd

expect you to find."

"I didn't. Zoe read it to me one evening. She was the one to see its

possibilities."

"It's spring, Lilly, and I want you to see the place. My sister Pauline

moved in last week. I want you to be our first guest. It's

spring, Lilly--"

It was his first mention to her of the recent purchase of a

one-hundred-acre estate at Tarrytown, although in her capacity of notary

public she had officiated at the drawing up of certain papers and deed.

Blue prints of plans had passed through her hands. That he had furnished

it she knew, too, from the magnitude of breath-taking bills from

decorators and dealers exclusive antique. It had piqued her more than

she would admit, his failure to solicit even her advice or opinion.

There was a framed photograph of plans on his desk in the office which

her eyes studiously avoided. Furtively and with the edge of her gaze,

she knew the house to be a low-length with Tudor peaks to it that gave

her a nostalgia for pools of green quiet and the leafy whisperings of

English countrysides she had never seen.

"I want you out at the place, Lilly, more than I can say. Please come.

The way things are clouding up, there is no telling how soon they'll let

me over for active service. Lilly?"

She shook her head.

"I can't. Zoe graduates next month, and--"

"Good Lord! the youngster!"

"Seventeen."

He whistled.

"Well, I'll be hanged. The sun-kid. Bring her out too, Lilly."

"Trieste is very strict with her. She is preparing for her audition in

September, and even if it could be managed, there is poor Mrs. Schum,

you know."

His eagerness would not endure obstacle.

"Bring her out, too. How's that, Lilly? I'll send a limousine full of

pillows for her. It will take Pauline's mind off her loneliness, having

some one to mother. We'll put her up in a sun room with a view of pine

woods and Hudson River that cannot be surpassed. It's spring--Lilly--"

"Poor Mrs. Schum!" she replied, her smile tired and twisted. "I'm afraid

her next journey will be a longer one than that."

"Poor soul! Does she still think that boy of hers is fighting?"

"Surely there is no wrong in saving her from the horror of the truth."

"You dear girl, of course, no. It's only that--somehow don't you think

that before she passed on she ought to know that he's gone on

before--even if you have to tell her that he died--gloriously?"

"I've thought of that," she said, looking away, "thought and thought of

it."

"Lilly," he cried, reaching for her two hands She drew them back quickly

and walked out.

That evening when she presented herself at the hospital the nurse met

her outside the door with her finger to her lips.

"She is sinking, but conscious."

Confronted with her emergency, Lilly stood before that closed door,

beating all over with her silent little prayer:

"O God, help me! Help me, help her!"

Mrs. Schum was quite conscious.

"Lilly," she said, reaching out a thin old hand that was covered with

veins as round as cables, "I've been waiting."

"Here I am, dear."

"I think I'm done, Lilly. I--dream so much--of God."

"Why, you're better, dear!"

"No. I'm going. I wanted so to wait for my boy. The doctor, can't he

help me to wait, Lilly? Ask him to help me to wait. I keep thinking he's

over there somewhere--Harry--funny isn't it? Over there waiting. You've

heard no news, Lilly?"

In this moment more propitious than she dared hope Lilly leaned over.

"Yes, dear, there is news."

"Harry?" she said quickly and sharply, lifting her head.

"Yes, dear--Harry--is--over there--waiting."

"His Mamma-Annie's boy--they were all against him. He can't stay back

here alone--he needs me, doctor--help me to wait for him--"

"Listen, dear--Harry's gone."

"Where?"

"Why--over there--just as your intuition told you."

She pulled at the sheet with fingers as fleshless as the feet of a bird,

moving her lips, vainly at first, and suddenly jerked herself up with a

strength no doctor would have conceded her.

"He's dead, Lilly. My boy's dead. Please--please--it is so--isn't it? My

boy's dead?"

"Yes."

"I knew it. Oh, Annie, you're the mother of a soldier. God wouldn't let

me leave him back here--alone. I wouldn't have left him. There wasn't

any good ahead for him. That's why I wanted him to die like a soldier.

Before he should come to the bad places ahead. I can go so easy now. I'm

done. God fixed it for me--Lilly."

She held the racked old form to her, kissed away tears that the washed

old eyes could hardly yield, made a couch of her arms, and held her

close so that their heartbeats met.

"Lilly, I feel so easy. I never felt so easy."

"Lie quietly, dear."

"Life can be hard, Lilly. And now--war. Make it easier for yourself.

Don't let him out there--go over there--anywhere--reproaching. Your

parents--your child--it's his as much as yours, Lilly. If I had gone

first, my boy would have reproached. There is nothing so terrible,

Lilly--as eyes that reproach--eyes--Lilly--don't."

"I--won't."

She drifted off then in the placidity of a sleep from which she was not

to emerge.

* * * * *

Lilly walked home that early morning following. Her direction lay in a

straight line through Central Park. Spring was out in firstlings of

every kind. The baby nap of new grass. Trees ready to quiver into leaf.

The sun came up from behind a sky line of skyscrapers, and as she was

crossing the Mall a fountain rained up a first joyous geyser, some

sparrows immediately plunging for a bath.

She sat down on a bench there in the lovely quiet, quite lax, and,

because of its pressure, her natty little blue sailor in her lap. The

air was like cool water and she closed her tired eyes to it.

Finally children began to trot past on their way to school. She heard

their shouts and watched them. A father passed with his little girl by

the hand and carrying her sheaf of books. A boy in knickerbockers lunged

furiously on roller skates. Another drove his ball under her bench and

she smiled as she drew aside to let him drive. A private in khaki threw

her a flirtatious glance. The sun found her finally.

Then Lilly followed one of her curious and absolutely irrepressible

impulses, one that must have been smoldering who knows how long.

She completed her walk through the Park. At Seventy-second Street, where

she emerged, a family hotel, one of those _de luxe_ mausoleums to family

life, reared showily. Without pause she turned in there, finding out the

telegraph desk; wrote her message largely and flowingly, leaning over

while the operator read out the words to her:

Mr. Albert Penny, 5198 Page Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri. Won't you

include New York in your visit to Washington and if possible bring

parents. Try to. Lilly Penny, 2348 West End Avenue.

Hearing that telegram repeated, the pencil marking time word by word, it

seemed to Lilly that each one of them was released with the spring of an

arrow from its bow, and that the operator recoiled, stunned, from the

impact of the message.

"Well," she said, leaning farther over the desk, and for some reason

shaping the word to a breathless question.

"Fifty-one cents," said the girl, through the inimitable laconism of gum

chewing.

CHAPTER VIII

Six hours later there was a reply folded in Lilly's purse:

We leave to-day for Washington. Arrive New York next Sunday 2.03 _via_

Pennsylvania. Albert Penny.

An incredible state of calm set in. She had the sensation of each

intervening day a shelf of terrace down which she was walking into a

deepening sea. Dreams ill-flavored as Orestes' filled her nights, and

how tired she was must have sopped into her pillow, but her capacity for

the present lessened her dread and made more bearable the fluent and

fateful passing of the time.

There were the details of the poor little funeral to be arranged. Lilly,

who had never known death, was suddenly face to face with it again, at a

time, too, when the incipient beginnings of pandemic that was later to

scourge the country was reaping its first harvest; a strange malady

carried on the stinking winds of war, shooting up in spouty little

flames, that, no sooner laid, found new dry rot to feed upon. Spanish

influenza, it was called, for no more visible reason than that it

probably had its beginnings in Germany or India.

On the Wednesday of Mrs. Schum's funeral five of the Amusement

Enterprise office force were home with it, one little telephone

operator, who occasionally laid the surreptitious offering of an orange

or a carnation on Lilly's desk, succumbing.

It was amazing how light the imprint of Harry and his grandmother. Of

effects there were practically none. A few tired-looking old dresses of

Mrs. Schum's. Eleven dollars and some odd change in a tin box behind a

clock. Harry's pinch-back suit with the slanting pockets. A

daguerreotype or two. The inevitable stack of modest enough but unpaid

bills. Odds. Ends. And in a wooden soap box shoved beneath Harry's cot,

old door bells, faucets, bits of pipe, glass door knobs, and, laid

reverently apart, a stack of Lilly's discarded gloves, placed to

simulate the print of the hand.

For days, Zoe, who had taken the tired willingness of Mrs. Schum so for

granted, cried herself bitterly into a state that threatened to take the

form of a fever, and then to the strophe and antistrophe of her young

grief, becoming self-conscious, burst, with not particularly precocious

rhyme, reason, or meter, into the following, which was printed in her

school paper:

"Teach me to live, O God,

If sorrow be to live,

Then let me know

All pain that it can give."

"Teach me to live, O God,

To know the gold from dross,

To live, dear God, to live.

I care not what it cost."

And Lilly, the dear mother dust in her eyes, had the page framed beneath

a faded photograph of Mrs. Schum, taken when her lips and breast

were young.

To attune Zoe to the coming of her family was no small matter. She was

outrageously rebellious, flagrantly irreverent, and for every outburst

Lilly bled her sense of blame.

"You've made a farce of everything, Lilly. You've fought for a

principle and, with it won, turned maudlin. What is the idea? To drag me

back there to join the sewing circle and the local society for the

prevention of spinsterhood to maidens?"

"You are not funny at all. You know you are clear of that kind of thing.

You're like an arrow on its way to its goal. Straight and sure. Nothing

can deflect you. That's why I dared."

"Well, then?"

"Realizations can come, Zoe, even to a selfishness as great as mine has

been."

"Sacrifice is not always beautiful. It can be silly and futile."

"Zoe!"

"Yes, and bring rewards to neither side. Half the people who are

sacrificed for become tearful tyrants, and those who do the sacrificing

sour and meek, or holy with righteousness."

"You are reciting the kind of thing you hear down at Daab's."

"I'm reciting you."

"You darling boomerang!"

"I suppose now you are sorry you didn't stay at home in your canary cage

to no one's particular advantage and your own terrific disadvantage. Now

that you have reared me into the kind of human being you set out to be,

you renig. Do you want to throw me back into that bowl with the greased

sides that you managed to climb out of? Not much."

This from Zoe, mixed metaphor and all, who at seventeen kept _Doll's

House_, Freud, _Anna Karenina_, and Ellen Key on the table beside

her bed.

"Theories go down, Zoe, before life--and death."

She sat haughtily young, and without tolerance, her profile averted and

trying to keep the quiver off her lips.

"Just when I'm ready to graduate and preparing for my audition--to have

this--"

"Zoe--Zoe--don't make it harder--"

"I'm a dog, Lilly--forgive me."

"The entire abominable condition is my fault--"

"Then thank God for the abominable condition. I love you and everything

you've done."

"Then be sweet to them for my sake. Your grandmother, she's going to be

unlike anyone you have ever known. She's a great one to pick up the

bread crumbs of life with a great ado. That's been her existence,

dear--little things. And your grandfather, Zoe, he's so gentle. Somehow

I imagine he is even gentler now. You remember I used to tell you how

we'd play at hide and seek long after I was grown. Oh, Zoe, be sweet!"

"I will, dear."

"And--your father. Whatever his attitude may be, remember the fault lies

in me--not him."

"Trust me, Lilly, if only he doesn't drop dead when he sees me!"

"Zoe!"

Between them the little drama was carefully rehearsed.

"Visi would pay big money for this act."

"You'll be your own natural sweet self, Zoe? No posing?"

"Don't worry. I suppose if the truth is known I'll have an aggravated

case of stage fright."

"They'll know--everything, Zoe, before I let them see you. Just be

simple, dear--and please--no dramatics!"

"It's all too dramatic for dramatics," she replied, cryptically.

It was finally decided that Lilly was to meet the train alone, settle

the trio at the Hotel Astor, and arrive at the apartment in time for a

dinner prepared by a cook and waitress especially brought in for

the day.

"Break the news in a public place, Lilly--the hotel lobby or a

taxi---and avoid family fireworks."

"My news can't be broken."

"Why?"

"Smashed, rather."

At four o'clock the morning of the arrival, Lilly was up, moving with

the aimlessness of great nervousness about the apartment. At that same

hour Mrs. Becker was emerging backward from her sleeper, kimono-clad,

and bulging through the curtains into the dark aisle.

"Carrie," her husband whispered after her, jutting his head out with a

turtle's dart, "it's only three o'clock, Eastern time. Why are you

getting up?"

"Because I want to," she said, plowing on.

Once in the dressing room, she fell to crying as she staggered and

dressed, apparently because each object, as she took it up, fell from

her fingers.

And yet the meeting occurred, as dreaded and anticipated moments often

do, damply, and as a heavily loaded bomb, for one reason or another, can

go off with a cat cough.

To the observer, what happened that early afternoon was simply a very

trim and very tailored young woman, her boyishness of attire somewhat

accentuated because her swift clean-cutness was so obviously its

inspiration, greeting, in the marble vastness of Grand Central Terminal,

a trio of what was plainly a pair of travel-stained parents and

perhaps an uncle.

Standing there peering between the grillwork as the train slid in

through the greasy gloom, watching the run of "red caps" and the slow

disgorging of passengers, Lilly saw it all in waves of movement, waves

of heat, waves of gaseous unreality.

Then she spied them. Her mother in the old, familiar vanguard, her

father with that bulge to his back from which the gray coat hung

loosely, Albert struggling to save his luggage from the fiery piracy of

a "red cap."

Her first sense was of fatness, their incredible, caravaning,

lumbaginous fatness! There was a new chin to her mother. Gone was the

old pulled-in waistline, but the old love of finery was out on her hat

in ostrich plumes, a boa of marabou lending further elegance. And her

father! He was somehow behind himself, slanting out from neck to quite a

bulge of abdomen, then receding again to legs that caught her throat

with a sense of their being too thin to sustain him. The fringe of hair

that showed beneath his slouch hat was quite white, too, and with that

same clutch at her throat she saw that it was thin as a baby's can

be thin.

It is doubtful if she would have known Penny. He was himself in

sebaceous italics. The old stolidity of stature was there, but hardly

the solidity. Like Mrs. Becker, he had chubbied up, so to speak, until

he looked shorter. And Albert was bald. It showed out under the rear of

his derby, like a well-scrubbed visage awaiting some deft hand to sketch

in the features, as poor Harry had done it to the clothespins. His

Scandinavian blondness was quite gone; there was just a fringe of tan

hair left and his jowls hung a bit, of skin not quite filled

with flesh.

All this in a telegraphic flash as she stood there waiting, and at the

sight of her father, on his too thin legs, dragging his cane slightly so

that it scraped, and in the other hand a sagging old black valise that

she remembered, all the tightness at her throat relaxed suddenly, the

tears coming so easily that she could smile through them.

The dragging of that cane, it hurt her poignantly, as little vagrant

memories can.

They spied her out even as she spied them, and, bodybeat to bodybeat,

she and her mother met, shaking to silent sobs and twisting hearts. Then

her father, pressing the coldly smelling mustache to her lips and

lifting her in the old way by the armpits, so that the instant closed

over her like a swoon.

With Albert it was strangely easier; there was a pause as wide as a hair

while he stood there blinking, and weighted with his unsurrendered

luggage.

"Albert," she said, finding the word at last.

At that moment, a "red cap," wild for fee, made for one of the brand-new

leather cases.

"Let go," he cried, in small anger. "That is a

six-dollar-and-ninety-eight-cent bag you are jerking."

Then he brought his gaze back to Lilly, his Adam's apple above the gray

necktie throbbing so that it seemed to her his entire body must

reverberate to the pistonlike process.

"Well," he said. "Well, well," the words dropping down into the dry well

of a gulp.

But somehow after the episode of the luggage, everything was easier, for

Lilly at least. She could smile now.

Very presently they were actually in a taxicab together, the talk of

the moment echoing against the silence of unspoken words taking shape

between them.

"Papa!" she said, finally, from the little folding seat opposite him,

stroking his hands and steadying herself with them against the throw of

the cab. "Oh, papa, papa!"

He smiled back through crinkles that were new to her, patting her in

turn and looking off.

Mrs. Becker fell to crying, pressing her handkerchief up against her

eyes and trying to lift her veil above the tears.

"After all these years," she kept repeating. "Years. Years."

"Now, now, Carrie--you promised."

"What hotel?" asked Penny, one of the bags across his knees and one

weather eye for the other on the driver's seat.

"The Astor; that is one of the best. I've your rooms all arranged for.

My--my place is too small."

"A less expensive would do, wouldn't it, mother?" addressing himself,

without once meeting Lilly's eye, to his mother-in-law.

"You're my guests," she said, trying to smile down old aversions. "This

is my party."

"Years--" sobbed Mrs. Becker. "She looks the same, but I'm a stranger to

my own child. Ben, we're strangers."

They were all suddenly in tears, Mr. Becker laying a clumsy hand to his

wife's arm.

"Carrie, you promised--"

"Can't help it--can't help it," her lips bubbling. "I'm bursting with

it. All these years. I can't hold in. What mother could?"

Only their arrival at the hotel stemmed the rising tide, but, once up

in their aerial suite of rooms, the last bell hop tipped out, then broke

the storm wave, flaying them all.

"Lilly--Lilly let me look at you. Baby--are you my baby--are you mine?

Years--O God--years--"

"Mamma--mamma--"

"Feel my heart. Ben--tell her--what I've suffered--"

"Carrie--now--now--what is past is past; we must look to the present

now."

"Papa dear--you look so changed and yet so--natural--"

There was an air of indescribable prosperity that rose off Mr. Becker,

in the nondescript but excellent quality of the gray suiting, the

polished, square-toed, custom-made shoes, the little linen string of

necktie, one for each day, the kind, despite family suasion, he had

always worn. But it was difficult for him to speak now because he was

always blinking and looking off.

"You've given us a great sorrow to bear, Lilly," he said, in a tone of

rehearsed reproach. "We tried to be thankful for our health

and--bear our--"

"There he goes on health again at a time like this. I'm a broken woman.

Years! Years of explaining lies to the community. Years of holding up

our heads over an opera singer that nobody ever hears about and that

never came home to her folks. Years of feeling them laugh behind our

backs--your father and husband trying to hold up their heads in business

under the lie. What have I ever done, I've asked myself all these

years--to deserve it? I've never harmed anyone. I've--"

"Carrie--please."

"Where do you live? How do you live? A stranger to my own child. Worse

than a stranger!"

"I've a well-paid position with a producing firm, mamma, and I live

nicely. You shall see, dear."

"Producing? Producing what? Trouble? A position! For that she threw away

her life. Her big talk of prima donna, and we find her in a position.

The girl that was going to set the world on fire. That's why we looked

our eyes out all these years for her name in the paper, only to find her

in a position! Ben, what have we ever done to deserve it? Albert, I'm

her mother, but my heart bleeds for you--"

He was tugging at his bag straps, industriously keeping his head

averted, but the red up in his ears.

"Mother," he said, "did you pack my throat atomizer?"

She licked up at the taste of her tears.

"It's wrapped in between your socks. You're standing in a draught,

Albert; close that window. You heard that man in the train about the

epidemic of colds that is starting all over the country. O my God! I'm

just so upset. And now that it has happened everything is so different.

I could tear out my tongue for what I want to say and I can't say

anything--not so much your father and I--at least we had Albert to help

make it up to us. We know what a son he has been, don't we, Ben, but to

think of him, the upstandingest boy that ever wore shoe leather--him

having to suffer for it--"

"Carrie, Carrie, it's time to go over all that later. Let's get our

bearings. Lilly, you've not changed except for the bones kind of

setting and--"

"I don't like you in those shirt waists. Too mannish. The lace I used to

dress that child in! The way I used to love to poke in the

bins--sacrificed for her. These years--years. Lilly--tell me you've been

a good girl--that your sinning has only been against us--child that I

raised--Lilly--"

They were locked in embrace again, Mrs. Becker blown hot and cold by the

ever-shifting clouds of her emotions, the two men standing by in a state

of helplessness that was always in inverse proportion to the lavalike

eruptions from the crater of her nerves.

"Mother, father and I will leave you alone for a while and you have your

talk together first--"

"No! She's your wife. You have yours first! It's about time you were

coming into some of your rights!"

Such a fiery redness was out in Albert's ears that against the lights

they were of the translucency of red-hot iron, and even through her pity

for his _malaise_, her old poignant distaste of him would not be laid.

She wanted him to lunge somehow with that bull-like head of his with the

bashedin squareness to its top, but since nothing like that happened,

she sprang up instead, grasping her mother's hand.

"Not now," she cried. "I want to tell you all something first, and then

I want to take you--to my place--to see where--the way I live--"

"Yes," said Mrs. Becker, rising with a crinkling of nose and drawing her

marabout boa about her, "I want to see the way you live--first. Guests

of hers at a hotel like this. A position, she tells me.

Lilly--Lilly--for God's sake tell me you've been a good girl--"

"Carrie!" At the sound of rare thunder in her husband's voice she did

subside then. Later she began.

"Nice rooms. Nicer than in Chicago that time. Albert, let me give you a

clean handkerchief out of the valise.... No, you don't know where they

are. Don't like that shirt waist. Too mannish. Don't worry about those

pillows, Albert. I brought your little one along. Glass tops. That's

nice, isn't it? How would you like one for your chiffonier at home,

Albert? Quit whittling toothpicks on the floor, Ben--Oh dear! if

somebody don't say something, I'll scream--"

"Come, mamma--papa--Albert. I want to take you--home, and while we drive

up there I want to talk to you."

But once within the cab and with her mother's constant runnel of talk

and its threat of hysteria, courage failed Lilly, so she sat back,

holding herself against rising panic and her mind refusing to hook

tentacles into the situation toward which they were speeding.

"You look mighty well, Lilly," her father would repeat, gently; "not

much changed, but a little more settled--in the bones--"

"Who does your darning and mending?"

"I do, mamma. See, this is Broadway, papa. We're just rounding the

famous Columbus Circle."

"I don't see much difference between this and St. Louis. Do you, Ben?

Just stores and stores like there are on Olive Street. Oh, look! There

is one of the Ryan Cut Price Drug Stores, just like we have at home.

Look at the crowds around that thing--what's that? 'Subway,' it says--"

"Lilly, Lilly, it makes me tremble when I think of you in this great

city alone."

"Why, papa, I never was so safe."

"It's not decent, that's what it's not."

"Now, Carrie--"

"Stop cutting me off every time I open my mouth."

"How far is it?" asked Albert, speaking for the first time.

"Why, I guess it ought to take about ten minutes from here," replied

Lilly, grateful for the question and trying to meet his averted glance.

He withdrew quite a disk of silver watch, reading it carefully.

"We're already on the way seven and a quarter minutes," he said.

"Albert," she began, "there is something I want to--ought to--tell

you--first--"

"Albert, close that window next to you."

"I--don't quite know--how to begin--"

"Close it all the way, Albert, you're still in a draught."

Suddenly Lilly sat back, silent holding her father's hand the rest of

the way.

But no sooner were the three of them safely into the little front room

than, without even seating them, she rushed out to forestall Zoe.

But too late. That young lady herself had already appeared between the

curtains of the alcove. She had done the outlandish, the outrageous, the

irrelevant thing.

An old red rep portière wound tightly around her body to below the

armpits, and held there by skillfully adjusted bands of black velvet, a

fillet of the same so low that it touched her eyebrows secured about her

boxed and brilliantly blond hair, she held the half-profile pose of a

Carmencita, a pair of ten-cent-store black earrings dangling and her

upflung gesture one of defiance, mischief with an unmistakable dash of

irrepressible dramatics.

In a silence that shaped itself to a grin, Lilly, caught midstep as it

were, stood regarding her daughter. She wanted to scream, to throw back

her head and shout her hysteria, to spank her daughter bodily there

across her knees, and more than that she wanted to laugh! Enormous

laughter, to allay her sense of madness.

Instead she found voice, which, when it came, was not her own, for

thinness.

"Albert," she said, "this is your daughter--Zoe."

"Ben," whispered Mrs. Becker, out of a fantastic cave of silence and

rising suddenly from her chair to plant herself on the overstuffed

divan, where there was more horizontal room--"Ben, I think I'm going

to faint."

And she did.

CHAPTER IX

Yet within a week Mrs. Becker, through all the fog of her bewilderment,

was embroidering seed pearls on her granddaughter's white

graduation slippers.

Forty years of dogged loyalty to the white string ties, fresh every day,

had gone down before seventeen's mandate; and to Ben Becker's

unspeakable sheepishness, he had appeared one evening in an impeccable

dark-blue knitted cravat, his collar, of cut heretofore easily inclusive

of chin, snugger to his neck, and flowing out to slight points.

"So you let her bamboozle you into something I couldn't accomplish in

thirty-eight years," was Mrs. Becker's sole comment through a mouthful

of seed pearls.

"Nonsense! The child has ideas. These collars don't dig in."

"Humph! She's had you around her little finger from the start."

"Now, Carrie, why do you say that?"

"Because it's true," trying not to smile.

It was.

An immediate _entente cordiale_ had shaped itself around Zoe and her

grandfather. She named him with her usual fantastic aptitude.

"Dapple-dear," she would have it, and could not explain the choice. It

must have been some such remote analogy as his likeness to an old

dapple-gray family horse, patient flanked and thoroughly imperturbable

to the fleck of the whip.

Her grandmother she promptly christened "Tippy," also for a reason she

could not or would not divulge. But one evening, to her secret

amusement, Lilly found a sheet of paper in the litter of the desk,

jotted all over with Zoe's joyous scrawl, "Zantippe," in every case the

first syllable crossed out.

All but Albert. She addressed him quite studiedly, "Father," her teeth

coming down in a little bite over her lower lip, her use of the term

never failing to elicit the rush of red to his ears.

He seemed tranced, falling into all plans, just so they included the

presence of his mother-in-law, without comment. To her proverbial apron

strings he kept firm hold, literally not permitting her out of his

sight. Even when he addressed Lilly or his daughter his gaze was

straight for Mrs. Becker, and the flags of her moral support that he

must have had the eyes to see waving for him in her glance.

The impending interview began to take on the proportions of a delayed

tooth-pulling. Repeatedly Lilly had cleared the way for it; just as

repeatedly he had fled to cover. A week passed.

Meanwhile something disquieting happened. It developed in further

correspondence from Washington on the matter of canteen equipment, that

there was some thought of sending Albert to France. An increased

stolidity was his sole reaction, but there was no doubt that the

prospect of an impending ocean trip weighed heavily.

The submarine situation, at a time when the seas were sown with the

menace of sudden death, was of greatest and worrying concern to him.

No new device was overlooked. His room at the hotel was littered with

rubber suits, guaranteed to keep the body floating upright for thirteen

hours. Adjustable cork life savers. Patent propellers. Wings.

There was talk, in the face of the impending contingency, of applying

for a commission. Albert in olive drab! To Lilly he would not conjure.

But meanwhile, to the slow champings of a huge governmental machine in

travail, there was little to do but wait, and in the interim not a day

that he and Mrs. Becker failed to follow up this or that newest device

against bone-cracking seas.

"Albert, there must be a way out! Don't tell me there are not plenty of

men who could help install canteen service. Let them send Vincent

Bankhead. He's younger. You leave it to me if they decide to send you.

I'll find you a way out. It's done every day."

"Wait until I'm called, mother; then there's time to act."

But his eyes were worried.

One day when the strain of holding together the precarious threads of

the situation was becoming almost more than she could bear, and the end

of the ten-day vacation period she was allowing herself from the office

was at hand, Lilly spread three matinée tickets out on the table of a

tea room where the five of them were lunching.

"Zoe, you and your grandparents are going to the Hippodrome this

afternoon. Albert and I will take a walk or a drive and meet you at the

hotel afterward."

"Mother, you come, too."

"No, Albert, Lilly's right. I want this thing settled. I want something

decided or I'll go mad. My husband has got me muzzled; I'm afraid to

open my mouth; but if I don't know something soon, I'll go crazy. Why

are we here? When are we all going back? I don't like it here. I can't

stand the noise. My servant girl is out there eating me out of house and

home. I didn't even lock the grocery closet; that is the state of

excitement I left home in. Something has got to be settled. The minute I

open my mouth to talk about what is in the back of all our heads,

everybody shushes me up. Now you two go and talk it out. I want to go

home. I want us all to go home. I'm a wreck. I--"

"Carrie--"

"Oh, I'll shut up! Next time you travel with me, get me a muzzle. All

I'm good for is to bear the brunt of everything. You've dribbled my head

full of enough these last seventeen years to drive any woman but me

crazy. But with her, it's a soft mouth. I'll shut up, but for God's sake

settle things. I'm going crazy. I can't stand it."

The look of one trapped settled over Albert,

"I think I'd rather walk," he said; "those cabs are reckless and the

meters run up so."

"Don't curl up your lips so, Lilly, over a little economy. Albert's

right. What good does it do you to earn, the way you spend? Your husband

has forty thousand dollars to show, and what have you to show? Taxicab

rides don't draw any interest. Don't be so ready to curl up your lips."

"Why, mamma, you imagine things!" And to Albert, "Of course, let's

walk."

For two hours, then, oftentimes stopping to face each other, they paced

the wind-swept rectangle of the reservoir in Central Park, spring out in

the air, but quite a tear of breeze across their high place.

He was sullen, casuistic, and impenetrable as a sea wall under a

dashing, and the thought came to her that had he presented any other

surface it would have been easier.

"Well, Albert," she began, facing him there in the wide afternoon light,

"what is there that we two can say to each other?"

"Words," he said, stodgy in his bitterness, "mean nothing against

seventeen years."

"You're right. And yet--I want you to know, Albert--before you go

across--"

"Don't be too sure you'll be rid of me that way."

"Or before you go back home--that she is yours as much as mine and--"

"Generous," he said, dryly.

She could have beaten her head with a sense of futility.

"You've been a bad woman with a streak of devil in you. Tried to ruin my

life, but I didn't let you. No, siree! I've worked things out. I've

gotten on. I'm big in my way--in my business--in my home."

"Albert, I love to hear you say that!"

"You! You don't love anything or anybody outside yourself."

"Why? Because I took my chance to save myself from everything I--I

hated! Not you--not they--but everything it stands for out there. Does

self-preservation imply only selfishness?"

"Whatever it implies," he answered, stung to dark red by his effort for

quick retort, "you're selfish--rotten selfish. But you haven't kept me

down. I've gotten up these eighteen years--and you--you--Bah!"

"You've been happy, Albert? Tell me you have."

"Happy! I'm not a hog for happiness. You to inquire about my happiness!

Lots you care! I've had my share of contentment. Contented as a man can

be in a community where he has kept up a farce for seventeen years that

his wife is off with his consent studying opera. But I've kept my

name--kept it in spite of you. I don't know what's been what with you.

Guess if the truth is known, I'm afraid to think what's what!"

"Albert--"

"Oh, I don't put anything past you. I don't even know if that girl is

mine. For all I know you're a--"

"Albert!"

"Bah! I don't put anything past you!"

She faced his words as if they were blows, letting them rain.

"You're lying, Albert," she said, evenly. "She's yours and you know it."

"I've kept _my_ name! Kept it and tried to make it up to your parents,

who deserved better than you!"

She quivered and the red that sprang out in her face was almost purple,

and yet by her silence bared her chest for more, as if grateful for the

sting of the lash.

"Bah! Don't be afraid. I don't want to know anything, but I'm not the

booby I may seem to you. When a woman has lived around this way for all

these years, in with a gang of show folks--Bah! I don't want to

know." And spat.

"She's yours, Albert, and you know it. You know it!"

"Yes, I guess she is, from the look of her, not that I put anything past

you. But that's your business. You're nothing to me. I'm cured of you.

You couldn't make me suffer the way they do in books. I've kept my name,

so if it's divorce you have on your brain, you might as well get it out,

because--"

"No, Albert--"

"I've kept my name, whatever you've done to yours. Your life is your

business. But the girl. That's where I have a right or two coming

to me."

She was prepared for just this, but somehow when it came it was a full

moment before she could answer, for the rush of fear that choked her.

"That's for--for Zoe to decide."

"That's for _me_ to decide. She goes to a decent, respectable home where

she belongs. You're not fit to raise her. Look at what you made of her.

A fine specimen. A short-haired freak with all your crazy ideas thriving

in her head. You've ruined your life, but you didn't succeed in ruining

mine and you won't ruin hers. You and your stage-struck notions that

never got you anywhere. She's going home where she belongs!"

She could hardly breathe for keeping down the rising tide of her terror,

but her eyes were always cold for him.

"Your daughter has a lyric-soprano voice, and however little that may

mean to you she is going to delight the world with it some day. One of

the great masters of the world has made her his protégée. She is

preparing for her audition--her hearing--in the fall, and it is even

possible she may be singing in grand opera next season. You cannot--"

"I'll see her dead first. You were an opera bird, too. I'll see her dead

first before I let her make a zero mark out of her life as her crazy

mother did before her."

"Albert, can't you see! Zoe's the wine. You, mamma--papa--the vine. I

don't count. I--I'm sort of the grape--that fermented--you see! She's

me--plus. Her arm is long enough to touch what she wants. Mine wasn't. I

saw it, but I couldn't reach. I was one generation too underdone. You

cannot have Zoe. I cannot. She doesn't belong to you or me. She belongs

to life. She's not mine. She is only my success; she--"

"She--goes--home!"

"No!"

"Why in God's name did you get me on here? You don't expect to see me

stand by and countenance your craziness?"

"Why! Why! I've asked it ever since the moment I sent the wire. Why! I

had to do it somehow--a fear of--something--war--life--death--but you

shall not have her. Not unless she decides it that way. No. Never!"

"I'm a slow thinker! And slower to act. That's been my trouble. But this

time the bit is between my teeth. I've a family now and family

obligations. Don't be so sure yet that I'm on my way overseas. There is

a way around every situation if you look for it hard enough. My place is

here now. Home! My daughter goes home!"

She could see in profile the heavy jaw clamp upward, and more and more

that wooden stodginess became terrible to her. In a flash-back she could

see those seventeen years of beefsteak suppers; his temples at-their

trick of working. Seventeen years all cluttered up with bed casters,

bathtub stoppers, and poultry wiring. That party back there at Flora's.

The lotto and tiddledywinks tables laid out. Page Avenue on a summer's

day with the venders hawking down it--ap-ples--twenty cents a

peck--ap-ples. Zoe--caught!

She closed over his wrists with a little predatory grip.

"Albert, don't do that! Don't take her back. She'll claw you like a wild

eagle in a cage--out there. She belongs to the world. In the fall she

sings for Auchinloss. It may lead to anything! Albert--you ask why I

sent for you. Let her be. Let her stay here with Mrs. Blair--a friend--a

dear--good friend of mine. Her education--Take me, Albert. Take _me_

home--Albert."

At her hand on his wrist something raced over him like the lick of a

flame; he pressed against her with the entire length of his body and his

lips were moist.

"Lilly," he said, very darkly red and trying to clasp her about the

waist, "I'll take you! I oughtn't, but I will. Come back, Lilly, and

make it up to me for all these years. Being near you makes me forget

everything except that--you are near me. I've missed you all these

years--I guess--but never so much as this minute. You've gotten so

handsome with the years. Something--Come home, Lilly--make it up to me.

Give me--your--your lips!"

She kept retreating before the dark red and the moist lips which he wet

more and more with his tongue.

"Will you leave her be--then--Albert? Here?"

"Lilly--your lips--give me."

"Will you, Albert--leave her here--Zoe?"

She could feel the scald of his breathing.

"Yes--if you come."

"You promise?"

"Yes, Lilly. Your lips--let me."

Suddenly he had her to him, there in the light darkness of the deserted

square of reservoir, kissing her so that his mouth smeared over

toward her ear.

She was not quick enough entirely to avert her face, and in the embrace

his Adam's apple was against her throat so that she could feel it beat,

and with her nails biting into her palm to keep her from screaming, she

was shrieking over and over to herself at his nearness: "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!"

CHAPTER X

Albert did not sail.

A certain depression seemed to settle over him the evening following,

after they had dined at a Broadway restaurant and were spending the

interim before theater in the lobby of the Hotel Astor, where Mrs.

Becker never tired of observing and commenting upon the transient swirl

and peacockery.

"Look at that tight skirt, will you! It's a shame for any

self-respecting woman to have to look at, much less wear it."

"Tippy dear, not so loud."

"Look at that low-cut back, will you! And white hair, too. I wouldn't

live in this town if you gave it to me! Sixty cents for string beans the

menu read to-night. I can buy a bushel at home for that. If I had been

alone I know what I would have done. Walked out. It's only for

millionaires here. The rest have to live in back rooms so they can put

everything on their backs. You should thank your stars you have a home

to go to, Lilly, instead of you and Zoe crying over each other all day.

If I had my say she would go, too. Education! St. Louis education is

good enough for anybody. Ben, I want you to look! If I was to ask you to

buy me a chiffon cape like that you would drop in your tracks."

"Now, old lady, do I ever refuse you anything?"

"No, because I never ask for anything."

"I think we had better be going," said Lilly, leaning forward to tilt

Zoe's hat farther down over her face. "I don't want you to miss the

first act."

There was to be a box for "Who Did It?" and a visit behind scenes

between acts.

"I want to get a look-in on what goes on behind there," specified Mrs.

Becker through a sniff. "Fine mess!"

From where he sat with crossed knees and his nicely polished shoes far

out so that passers-by were forced to a small detour, Albert looked

suddenly across at his mother-in-law, rather scaredly white.

"Mother," he said, "I've got a pain in my chest."

On the instant her rosiness blanched.

"Albert, one of your colds coming on? They never start on your chest.

It's influenza; the papers are full of it. They say next winter we're

going to have it in a terrible epidemic. Albert, what hurts?"

He inserted two fingers into the front pleat of his shirt.

"It hurts here," he said.

"Albert," cried Mrs. Becker, instantly taken with panic, "let me feel if

you have any fever!"

"Now, now, Carrie, don't create a scene here in the lobby. You've nursed

him through enough colds not to be alarmed."

"But, Ben, in his chest! It's a symptom, I tell you; the papers are full

of it!"

"Nonsense, Carrie! It's probably a little indigestion. You will insist

upon those table d'hôtes. On the way to the theater we'll stop in at a

drug store."

"Theater! Don't even mention the word. Come upstairs, Albert. Luckily I

put a pair of your flannelette pajamas in the trunk. Ben, you rush over

to the drug store for some camphorated oil. Albert, do you feel achy?"

Lilly laid out a quietly firm hand on his arm.

"Mamma, please let Albert get a word in."

"I know that boy like a book. He looks feverish."

"Albert," said Lilly, holding to the sedative quality in her voice, "do

you feel ill?"

"I've a pain in my chest," he persisted, doggedly and with the drawn

look about his mouth whitening.

They put him to bed. By nine o'clock a slight flush lay on Albert's

cheek and he kept feeling of his brow.

"I think I have fever," he said once, always in scared white manner.

"Look in the paper and see if dry lips is one of the symptoms."

Then Zoe was dispatched home and the house physician called in, Mrs.

Becker, as usual, tempestuous with instantaneous hysteria and conjuring

to Lilly another sick room from out the hinterland of her childhood.

"Doctor, is it the Spanish influenza? Has he fever? He's always subject

to colds, Doctor. He's not as strong as he looks. I've sat up many a

night with his quincy sore throats. Many is the time, before we got the

auto, that I rode down for him in the street car with his rubbers, if a

rain came up. Doctor, do you think it could be that Spanish influenza? O

God! if he should take sick away from home! Our doctor at home

understands his system. My boy--my son--"

With a frozen sense of her alienism, Lilly sat, as it were, outside the

situation, proffering herself almost with a sense of intrusion.

The doctor would not pronounce, but left with instructions and the

promise of a midnight return. Into that Mrs. Becker read darkly.

"He's a sick man or one of these busy New York doctors wouldn't be

returning again to-night. My boy is a sick man."

Meanwhile Albert had fallen into a light sleep. They sat beside his

bedside watching his lips puff out, sometimes in bubbles.

The silence of midnight descended over the transient formality of the

hotel room.

Undoubtedly Albert had a fever which seemed to be rising. He moistened

his lips now constantly and threw himself about beneath the coverings,

and then Mrs. Becker, not to be restrained, would lean forward to brush

backward from his brow, as if there were hair.

At midnight the doctor returned and at one o'clock Albert was removed to

Murray Hill Hospital.

He was ill three days, slipping off almost from the beginning into a

state of coma from which he did not emerge.

With a celerity that was presently to race it through the country, this

strange malady laid low its victim with what might have been pneumonia,

except for certain complications that baffled and alarmed an already

thoroughly aroused medical world.

The second day a sort of dark rash broke out over Albert's chest, so

that his nurses entered the room in gauze masks, and finally, in spite

of Lilly's protestations and Mrs. Becker's most violent hysterics, no

admittance to the sick room was granted them.

And now comes a tide in the affairs of Lilly Penny which, being too true

life, is not sufficiently true to fiction.

On the day that was to have been Zoe's formal graduation from High

School, so that the pearl-embroidered slippers were never worn and her

diploma brought home to her by a classmate, Albert Penny died, with no

more furor than he had lived.

Stupor enveloped Lilly. She moved through days incredibly crowded with

detail, and yet, somehow, so withdrawn into the very nub of herself that

it was the shell of her seemed to compete with the passing time.

Certainly it was this shell of her followed Albert in that strangest of

little processions, to his cremation.

There had been an effort to travel west with the remains, but quarantine

conditions forbade, and it was just as well so.

Four times on that ride through a warm summer rain to the crematory Mrs.

Becker went off into light faints, sobbing herself back into

consciousness. It frightened Lilly to look at her father; his face had

dropped into hollows and the roundness of his back was suddenly a

decided hump. And he had fallen into a silence. A sort of hollow urn of

it that not even the outbursts of his wife could rouse to his usual

soothing chirpings. He merely sat stroking her hand and staring into a

silence which he seemed to see.

A very quiet and very frightened Zoe had been packed off to Ida Blair's,

through it all Lilly's stupor persisting.

Mrs. Becker's state became cause for concern. Once back at the hotel,

with Albert's room locked off, and once more thrown open to the

impersonal feet of transiency, she would only moan and wind her hands

and go off into the light states of unconsciousness.

"I haven't my son any more! Why did we come? It might not have happened

at home. Our daughter wronged him, but, thank God, we tried to make it

up to him. My boy. He was so steady--so careful. I can't realize he's

gone--without me. The way he used to come home. Never a habit--evening

after evening his newspaper and bed. Thank God, I don't think he ever

missed her going as he might have. It hurt at first. He wanted to resign

his Bible class, and that day we broke up the house--he kept twitching

with his eyes. You remember, Ben. And that bed caster. Funny to have

twitched over that. It seems he brought it home the night she left--it

came over him all of a sudden, it wouldn't ever have to be fitted in.

That's it! O God! all these years without knowing his own child. He was

so steady--a good boy if God ever grew one. Ben, Ben, how can we go home

without him? How can we go home without our boy?"

"Carrie, it is God's will."

"It is nobody's will. God couldn't will it that way. Just as he had got

a little happiness in his way. To think he was willing to take her back.

I don't care for myself, we're on in years, Ben--we're done--and now

we've lost our--all--nothing to live for--"

"Mamma, mamma, don't talk that way. Let me try to make up to you for--"

"I can't face going home. He was my life, that boy. He made up for what

we suffered through our own. He was a son to us. I can't face going home

without him. Albert--where are you? Albert!"

"Mamma, mamma, won't you let me try to make up, dear, for what I have

failed you?"

"Albert--can't you hear me--Albert--"

"Carrie, we've got our daughter back. Isn't that something to be--"

"I want my son, I tell you."

"Mamma darling, you're killing me. Let me make it up to you--even a

little--the--"

"No, no; you're not a daughter to me. I want my son. Our way was his

way."

"Mamma, please--take me home in his place. I'll make it up to you. Let

me go back, dear, in Albert's place. I want to pay up--to you. I'm

finished--here, dear. I'm ready--ready--"

Suddenly Mrs. Becker seemed to experience one of her cyclonic shifts.

Tears came raining down her face, her sobbing cleft with great racking

gulps. Then she dropped to her knees beside her daughter, and, before

Lilly could prevent, reached up to drag down her face against her own

tear-drenched one.

"Don't leave us, Lilly. Don't ever. Come home with us. We're getting

old, Lilly. Don't ever leave us, me and papa. Promise me,

Lilly. Promise."

"Of course I promise, mamma darling. Of course I promise."

CHAPTER XI

For a full week after Albert's strangely curtailed obsequies, a gray

blanket of woolly humidity hung with July unseemliness over the city in

a clinging fog that feathered the throat.

The morning that Lilly returned to the office electric lights were

burning and electric fans were whirring into it.

The unassailed normality of the machine whose functioning depended upon

its parts! How easily even the most component of those parts could be

replaced! The rows of stenographers, in her but two weeks' absence, new

faces among them, outlined against windows of space and East River. The

hinged little mahogany gates swinging to their goings and comings. Her

own office with its glazed pane of door glass and outlook over city

roofs and tug-specked band of river.

It was as if the tide of life were once more licking at her feet. She

hung up her hat, patting at her hair in the little square of mirror

above the stationary washstand, looking back at herself out of eyes a

bit dreggy with tiredness, but her skin so deep in its whiteness that it

was almost as if its creamy quality had congealed of mere richness.

She rubbed her cheeks to pinken and quicken them, and rang for an office

boy, turning her back on the pile of letters and her reports on the desk

and her eagerness to be at them.

"Ask Mr. Bruce Visigoth if he can see me."

The message came back on the instant. He could.

She turned the knob to his office door so slowly that she saved the

slightest squeak, and stood there with her silhouette against the ground

glass for a long moment. When she did enter, from the center of the room

where he had been watching her silhouette against the pane, Bruce

advanced to meet her.

He took her hand and on the instant she felt her eyes fill, burningly.

He was in summer and office negligée, an unlined blue-serge coat, a

white-silk shirt which lay lightly to his body flexuosity, and above the

soft collar he had taken on enough outdoor tan to make his smile whiter.

She could have bitten her lips for their trembling, and tried to smile

with her tortured eyes.

"Lilly," he said, topping her hand with his, "why didn't you let me know

sooner? Your letter an hour ago came out of a clear sky. You see, I

didn't even know he--he was here."

"It was all so--so quick!"

"Jove! I don't seem to take it in yet."

"Nor I," she said, quiescently and letting him lead her to a chair.

"He--You see, he was only ill three days."

"There doesn't seem much for me to say, does there, Lilly?"

"No," she said, "that's it, there's nothing to say."

"I can't bear to think of your having been exposed to it."

"That was the least. He died--afraid. That is so terrible to me,

somehow. I wouldn't mind all of the horrible rest if only he hadn't

died--afraid. I wonder if you know what I mean. He lived so--so meekly

to have died--that way. Afraid."

"Yes," he said, "I think I do know." He wanted to keep his gaze away

from her and to keep it cool, but somehow each time their eyes met a

flame leaped up out of embers, a fiery new consciousness that

kept dancing.

"He and--and my parents--you see, they--Well, I told you everything in

the letter."

"Are your parents returning home?"

"Yes. That's what I've come to say. You see--they--we--we've decided to

remain here two months. Until September--up in my little apartment, all

of us. In September Zoe is to have her audition with Auchinloss. So much

depends on that. We've such hopes, her teacher and I. She's pure lyric

soprano. We think grand-opera brand. And now with the war on, more and

more the American girl is getting her chance. That's why my parents have

finally consented to wait here with me until then. After that, Zoe is to

stay with Ida Blair and we three--my parents and I--are going

home--together. That is what I have come to tell you. I'll be giving up

my work with you in--September. I'm going home--with them."

He regarded her, his flush going down perceptibly.

"You're fooling."

"No," she said, trying to smile. "I suppose it's about the most solemn

job I have left to do in life--going home."

"Why, you--you can't go back there."

"I can," she said, her voice held calm.

"I--we can't let you go."

"Why? Zoe--my big job's done."

"Lilly, I tell you we need you here more than ever. My brother arrives

this morning from Seattle. We've completed the cross-country chain. I'm

free now to branch out. I'm counting on you. I'm full of an idea for

that community opera scheme and I'm ready to do the play from the

Russian on your say-so. Lilly--you cannot go now--"

"I can--must," she said, scraping back her chair. "You must work out your

dreams--alone--with some one else. I--must--go." And then withdrawing

from what she saw: "No! No! Bruce! No! No!"

But just the same they were in each other's arms with the

irresistibility of tide for moon and moon for tide. Press him back with

her palms as she would when his lips found hers, it was as if something

etheric had flowed into her brain. She wanted to resist him and instead

her hands met in a clasp about his neck. "No, no." And yet as he kissed

her eyelids and down against the satinness of her hair, it seemed to her

that toward this moment all the poor blind years had been directed.

"Lilly--darling."

She tried to shake off her enchantment.

"You hurt!"

"I want to."

"My--love."

"My love."

"So this--this is it?"

"What?"

"Love."

"Love. Love."

"How beautiful--sex."

"I want to kiss those stars out of your eyes. I want to wind you in

moonlight."

"Bruce, I think I must be mad. Crazily--deliciously mad."

"Me too. I'm as deliciously, as crazily mad as any young Leander. I want

to swim a thousand Hellesponts for you. I want--"

"No--no--no, Bruce, you don't understand--my love--"

"I do understand. That I have you now to love and adore, to marry--"

The door opened then, quite abruptly. It was Robert Visigoth. He had a

straw hat in one hand and an alligator traveling bag in the other. The

latter he set down rather abruptly.

So instantaneous was their springing apart and so ready the mind to

believe what the heart denied, that it was almost conceivable that he

had not seen. There was not even a pause, and through the perfunctory

greetings of these two men of strangest relation, Lilly found herself

somehow back at her desk, little prickles out all over her body and

particularly against her face, like the bite of sleet, something like

this running behind her lips:

"Please, God, don't let him tell. He promised! Please! God, I'll never

give in again. Bruce--my darling--don't let him tell you. He promised he

wouldn't. Don't tell him, Robert. Bruce, don't let him. Please,

God--don't let him."

After a while, burning with the fever in her blood, she plunged, for the

sedative of it, into the work before her. The first of a stack of

reports on her desk was from the Adelphi Theater, Akron, Ohio.

"Three Melodious Sisters." 12 minutes. Well received. Wardrobe worn.

"Whistling Bicyclers." 14 minutes. Skillful. Comedy weak.

"Please, God--don't let him--"

"Shenck and Bent." 9 minutes. 3 laughs.

"Sylvia King & Co." 9 minutes. Weak patter but finished strong.

"Musical Gypsies." 10 minutes. Fair. Good opening number.

"Please, God, don't let him tell."

After what might have been minutes or hours, then, the door opened and

without preamble Robert Visigoth walked in, and in the wide-kneed

fashion forced upon him by corpulency seated himself beside her desk.

"How long has this thing been going on?" he said, looking at her from

under beetling brows that had grown bushy with the years. Time had done

just that to Robert Visigoth. Beetled him. His years overhung him. He

carried them massively. It was not so much that he had lost his

waistline, but he had settled into himself. That was it! Robert Visigoth

had settled rather appallingly into himself.

For a second Lilly's eyes moved from the two fifty-cent cigars

protruding from his waistcoat pocket to a lodge button at his lapel, and

then, finally trapped, met his.

"How long? I said."

"You've told him?" she asked, leaning forward to hear through the

buzzing in her ears.

"Whether I do or not depends upon you."

She tried not to let him see how the room was rocking around and around,

how suddenly the buzzing had lifted until she felt light-headed. She

could have shouted, danced, wept, or fainted her relief. Nothing

mattered, not even the squatty person sitting there with little diabetic

puffs beneath his eyes.

"How long has this thing been going on?" he repeated, his voice a rising

gale.

"Are you your brother's keeper?"

"From your kind, yes."

"There has been nothing between us."

"That's a lie."

Through the scorch of her humiliation it was a second before she could

command her lips.

"I swear to God."

"Bah!" he almost spat out, "after what I walked in on!"

"Yes," she said, biting off the words with a clip, "after what you

walked in on."

He leaned forward with a thrust of face that was unpleasantly close.

"All I have to say is, hands off there."

"There has been nothing between us. I tell you it's true."

"I'm not concerned whether it is or not. What has been has been. But

now, hands off. You can't land my brother. I heard the word. Marry. The

cheek--you--my brother! You must be crazy."

"You're wrong. You're wrong," she managed to insist, her throat rising

and falling like a sea.

"My eyes aren't wrong. They saw what I stumbled in on."

"I know. I know. It's difficult--impossible to explain away an--an

occurrence like that. How well I know the futility of trying to convince

your kind of man that there are more than two kinds of women in the

world. Good and bad. The woman you marry and the woman you ruin. I'm

bad. Have it your way. Bad. Bad. Bad. But for what was your sin as much

as mine you are free in your man-made society to go your way, fulfilling

your life, and then you dare to come here and sit judgment on my

fulfilling mine. When are women going to venture from _behind_ the

man-made throne to sit beside, and make you men move over?"

"I'm not here to discuss the double code with you. I don't know and

don't care how you have lived since. It is not my business. For sixteen

years you have given this firm fine satisfaction for which we, in turn,

have tried to express our appreciation. You know that. We know that.

Your morals are none of my business except when they touch me! A man's a

man. I don't know how you've lived. For my part, I think you've gone

pretty straight, but that doesn't change matters. I know what I know,

and a man's a man. What are you going to do about it? You know, too,

that there is no love lost between me and my brother in the little

things. We go our ways. But when it comes to the big--he's my brother.

Blood. Get me? Whatever I am can't change me here inside. He's my

brother. You're--you!"

"You're right. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I must have been mad--this

morning. I--somehow--it got all beyond me in a moment. I swear to you

for the first time! Do you think I'd muss up one hour of his life? Even

if I dared? Even if you were to come to me, on your knees, begging me

to--to--marry him? To begin with, I'm older--only a year in time, it's

true, but he--he's just beginning. I'm beginning over. What is my life

compared to his? He's on the brink of a thousand realizations. And

I--oh, I'm not whining. I'd do it all over again, loathing you as you

must know I loathed you--that night. But my child got her chance. You

sold it to me and I paid for it in the basest coin of the realm. But I'd

do it again--knowing what I know now, I'd do it again. You hear! Do

you hear!"

"That's past now--"

"No. For you, yes, but I'm still paying. Paying at this moment with

my--my heart's blood. But if I hadn't done it--gone with you--something

would have been lost that night that was worth every cent I paid.

They'd have got her back. I don't care. I've won. I've won if

I've lost."

She was on her feet now, her eyes, like blue wells that were filling

with ink, plunging beyond his with a Testament defiance that seemed to

shout, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

"Yes, I love him. You can't take that from me. That is why he is so safe

from me. I love him too much for him to know. And yet I think--I

believe--I know that even if he did know, in the end it

wouldn't matter--"

"You must be crazy. Once let your idealist wake up and there is no more

dreaming for him."

"He mustn't ever wake up--for his sake! Promise. Promise me that you

won't ever wake him!"

"Whether I do or not is up to you."

"What do you want?" she said, tiredly.

"I suppose the black and white of it is that you must quit."

"That is easy. I'm resigning anyway the fifteenth of September to go

West to live."

He took on the half-conciliatory graciousness of one who has gained his

advantage with unsuspected ease.

"I'd give a great deal not to have had this happen, but, after all, a

man is a man and life is life."

She let her gaze bore into his like gimlets burning for center.

"I think you've explained that before."

He began to back out before her immobility.

"I am remaining East two months. I hope your resignation will allow us

that much time to attempt to fill your place."

"I leave that to you. It can be either immediate or take effect in

September."

"By all means the latter. Will you--can you believe me when I say if

there is anything I can do--letters--an opening with a Western firm--"

"Please," she said, turning him a shoulder in high distaste.

"I have your word--then?"

"My word," she said, looking past his hand toward the door.

He backed out in the somewhat ludicrous crab fashion and then she sat

down, swinging around on her swivel chair toward the desk. The stack of

reports lay facing her. She caught up the next in order.

People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma.

For the next half hour she must have sat there trying to co-ordinate out

of chaos by staring at the heading and repeating over and over again:

"_People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,

Oklahoma._"

* * * * *

Whistles were blasting through the noonday fog when Bruce finally and

without preamble burst into her office.

It struck her even on the gale of his entrance how young he was that his

hair should show the nervous plowing of five fingers, and how sensitive

his profile and ready to flare at the nostrils. His tie, too, burnt

orange, from a soft collar and badly knotted! She wanted to jerk up his

chin and putter at remaking the four-in-hand.

"Lilly--sweetheart--"

She sat regarding him over the top of People's Playhouse, Tulsa,

Oklahoma.

"Sweetheart, let us call it a day. I want to drive you out to Tarrytown

to--"

"Don't," she said, frowning.

"Don't what?" Her immobility an ineffectual stop to his exuberance.

"Come now," wanting to draw her from her chair by the two hands,

swinging them wide and then together; "don't let his nibs bouncing in

that way throw a damper. We were too quick for him, anyway. Don't

believe he saw a thing. And what if he did? He's going to know it

anyhow, and pretty quick, too. I want to shout it from the housetops, I

want to megaphone it up to the stars. Lilly--Lilly-mine! Sweetheart!"

She crowded back into the chair.

"How dared you!"

He fell back with his gesture still wide.

"Why--what? Dared what? Oh, come now, sweetheart, I could wager he

didn't see, and suppose he did? We've nothing to conceal. I'm for

telling him to-day!"

"No. No. No. You played unfair. You took me--unawares. You misunderstood

me horribly--most horribly."

"You mean--"

"Why, you--you _boy!_ What has happened cannot make any difference

between you and me. It was outrageous of you--silly _boy_ you--to--to

take advantage. After all that has passed--all these years--it is

unthinkable that you didn't understand. Why, you--you _boy!_"

She saw his jaw fall and the sense of his ridiculousness set in.

"What has merely been absurd all along you have suddenly made

intolerant. You make more imperative my resignation. You must

understand--Mr. Visigoth--under what conditions I will consent to remain

here these few weeks."

The words were so stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal

disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could

see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he

had been slapped.

"Lilly, for God's sake, you--you cannot be serious!"

"No mock heroics--please."

His ears tipped with flame; he straightened back from her.

"No more mock heroics," he said, in a voice suddenly quieted down like

vichy gone stale. "Forgive an old--fool--a young--fool--and forget it.

Thank you for jerking me up."

He raised her limp hand, bowing over it until his lips hovered but did

not touch.

"My solemn word on it this time--no more--mock--heroics." And still

Lilly, on the click of the door after him, could not clear her brain of

the running threnody of nonsense:

People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,

Oklahoma.

CHAPTER XII

Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the

days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors

and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an

interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly

there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact,

when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to

a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk

ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her in

Ida Blair's Long Island bungalow.

They were a group diverse of emotion and perilous to one another's

nerves this last morning.

MRS. BECKER: "I think I'd better write my girl another postal to be sure

and have supper ready when we get home Thursday night. There is some

canned salmon in the grocery closet, I forgot to mention, and she can

borrow a few potatoes from the Shriners for frying, until I get a chance

to lay in supplies when I get home. Poor Albert! How he loved creamed

salmon and fried potatoes! Ben, help me to realize what has happened.

O God, I--"

MR. BECKER: "Now, Carrie."

MRS. BECKER: "The Shriners are nice neighbors, Lilly. They are the only

ones besides us on the block who stuck after the street began to go

down. You'll like Edna Shriner. You remember her? Pock-marked. She used

to be in your dancing-school class. She never married, but how she keeps

that little home for her old father! Kitchen floor! You could eat off

it. And as handy a body with the needle as ever lived. Her French knots.

The guest-towels that girl has French-knotted."

LILLY (to herself): "Salmon and fried potatoes. Page Avenue. Shriners.

Funny!--O God!--Why--Oh!--Oh!--Funny!--"

ZOE: "Lilly, feel my heart, how it beats."

It was as if Lilly could not take her eyes from off her daughter.

"Remember what Triest said, dearest, let your nerves be so many violin

strings, tightening but not quivering."

"It's your going, Lilly--I--I can't seem quite to grasp it. You will

come back to me soon--in two months--one--I couldn't stand it longer!"

"Yes, and, Zoe, you will write every day. Every little single thing.

Your work--your life--your friends--every tiny success--"

"Lilly, Lilly--don't go! It's madness. Stay, darling. I feel like a

pig--all that money--his fortune. If you are not entitled to touch it,

I am not--"

"You are his child and the only wrong you ever did him was through me."

"Lilly--don't go, darling--"

"Zoe, don't tear me to pieces."

"I'll work, darling, as I've never worked before."

"Zoe, Zoe, go straight to your mark."

"I--I can't realize it, Lilly. To-day! He's going to hear me

to-day--this very afternoon. I--I feel as nervous at the prospect of

singing before you as before him. I--I think I'm the luckiest girl in

the world. Lilly, sometimes I--I--think life has--has sort of cleared

the way for me to walk in its lovely places--you have cleared the way.

But what--what if he doesn't think I've the voice _maestro_ thinks I

have? I couldn't stand that, Lilly--the way you stood it."

"But he will," said Lilly, a memory shaping itself. "Remember your power

begins where mine left off. You heard Du Gass the year before she died,

but you were too young to remember. Your voice is so much--so

infinitely bigger, Zoe, and your knowledge and defiance of life and of

the Auchinlosses--makes me so unafraid for you--"

"Kiss me, Lilly. I'm frightened--not of Auchinloss--or life--but

of--Oh, I don't know--frightened of silliness, I guess."

"I'm not."

"But you're trembling."

"Of hope."

At eleven Lilly went down to her office. Leon Greenberg already had her

desk. It was largely a matter now of sliding in the new prop before

sliding out the old.

There were several farewell offerings from various of the older girls.

The immemorial trifles that women exchange. A bottle of eau de cologne.

The inevitable six handkerchiefs. A silver bodkin for running ribbon

through lingerie. And from the booking department, a silk umbrella

suitably engraved. She cried a little.

By noon the top of her desk was bare and the drawers empty.

She sat looking out over the waves of roofs of a city that had beaten

her back at every turn, lashed her, and yet with the mysterious

counterflow of oceans had carried her out a foot for every ten it

flung her back.

She felt full of sobs, but quiet. Strangely quiet, as if the champing

machinery of her life had stopped suddenly, leaving an hiatus that made

her heart ache of passivity.

At two o'clock, by appointment, came Zoe ... like a blaze of light. Her

eyes with her mother's trick of iris, full of inner glow, and her blond

hair so daringly boxed, set off with a droop of tam-o'-shanter.

There had been a new frock of heavy white crepe with a wide white hat

for this occasion. Instead, with last-moment decision, she had come in

one of the straight blue frocks, the wide patent-leather belt, a knot of

orange and blue ribbon, representing her active membership in a local

canteen service, at her throat. She came glowing through the daring

simplicity, flamboyantly and to the nth power of Lilly's slower

personality, her mother's child.

"Hurry, darling, I've a taxi waiting. We're to meet _maestro_ at the

Opera House."

"Zoe, I'm glad you wore this instead. Did your grandmother feel badly

that you didn't wear the one she gave you?"

"I wasn't myself in it. No--room."

In the corridor, going out, Bruce stepped suddenly out of his office

into their path.

Zoe's hand had shot out.

"Hello, you!" she said.

He looked at her through a slow smile.

"Well, I'll be hanged! The youngster! Good Lord! What have they done!

Who elongated you? Where are the knee dresses and the corkscrews?"

She withdrew a highly haughty hand.

"You poor, misguided Rip Van Winkle. When did you return from the

Catskills?"

"When did it happen?" he asked Lilly, trying to keep his eyes from

crinkling.

It was the first time in this last brace of weeks that there had been

more than the merest perfunctory word between them, and she tried to

thaw her cold lips into a smile.

"You forget that you haven't seen her since last Christmas. Six inches

more of skirt and a few hairpins did it."

"Well, I'll be hanged!" he kept reiterating. "Zoe grown up!"

"Is it true you are going to try for the aviation? Ida Blair says you

are."

"Looks that way."

"You're too old."

"Well, then, I'll have to come down to earth. You and your mother have

different ideas regarding my age. I'm rather dizzy about it this minute,

myself. Either time is putting one over on me or you have caught up. By

Jove! that's it! You've caught up! You're immense!"

She was suddenly, and to Lilly's amazement, a creature of flashes and

quirks, of self and sex consciousness.

"Don't like to be--immense!"

"Gorgeous, then."

"Better."

"Don't go. Let me look at you."

"Come with us. Dare you."

"Zoe!"

"Where?"

"I'm singing this afternoon for Auchinloss. My audition at the Opera

House."

"The deuce you say!"

"I've a cab waiting," she said, challenging him with a flash of eyes to

their corners.

"Wait," he said, darting into his office.

"Zoe, how dared you?"

"Lilly--he's thrilling! I want him along; I feel keyed up now. The way I

want to feel! Edgy!"

Before her persistently cold lips would reply he rejoined them and

presently they were all three in the cab.

His contemplation of Zoe became a stare.

"So the little Zoe grew up."

"I'm eighteen. You used to be old enough to be my father. Not any more.

Now you are old enough to be my--anything."

"Zoe!"

"Good Lord!" he said. "Fact."

Suddenly her nervousness came flowing back over her.

"Lilly, look at me every second while I'm singing, darling. You too,"

leaning toward him and placing cold fingers on each of their wrists.

"Delightful and easy task."

She made him a _moue_, prettily pouty.

"You'll be sorry, when I'm famous, that you didn't take me seriously."

"How can I take you at all when you've taken me off my feet?"

"You've never heard me sing, have you?"

"No."

"Wait."

"I palpitate."

"I'm going to be all alone now, you know," she said, looking at him with

her brilliant eyes filling.

"More's the pity," he said, feeling rather than seeing the downward

brush of Lilly's lashes.

"I'll be out at Ida Blair's until--for a while."

"May I come out and play with you, now that you are caught up and I can

be your--anything?"

"You may."

Laughter.

With the stopping of the cab such a javelin of nervousness shot through

Lilly that it was as if it had pierced her heart.

A lovely pallor was out over Zoe, enlarging the dark pools of her eyes.

"Sit out in the house, center aisle, and look at me, dears--so I can

feel you there--"

To the magic of a bit of cardboard Lilly and Bruce were in the vast

fantastic hinterland of the Opera House, and, stumbling through various

degrees of blackness, were presently down in the colossal maw of the

auditorium, finding out seats in the great pit of darkness.

They sat in silence, except that for Lilly the beating of her heart

seemed to record like a clapper against her brain.

"Don't be nervous," he said once.

"I'm not," she lied.

There was a bunch light on the stage, a dirty backdrop of Corinthian

pillars and esplanade and no wings, one or two stage hands moving about,

and finally a concert grand piano dragged down.

Suddenly Lilly recognized Auchinloss. He was standing just outside the

pool of light that flowed over the piano, the unforgetable outline of

his shaggy head, joined by two little peninsulas of sideburns to the

heavy spade of beard, gray now and not the sooty black she remembered.

The odor of that little room up on Amsterdam Avenue came winding back.

Millie du Gass, the supreme soprano of two continents--dead now, of

heartbreak, some said; Alma, in her plaid-silk waist and the

bookkeeper's curve to her back. That walk across the parlor floor--

"There's Auchinloss now," said Bruce.

She did not reply, but sat with her handkerchief against her mouth and

crowded breathing.

There were three auditions.

A high-bosomed young woman with a powerful mezzo soprano that pulled her

mouth to a rhomboid sang Santuzza's famous aria from "Cavalleria

Rusticana," stopping suddenly to some unseen signal.

"Fine, strong voice of resonant tin," said Visigoth, under his breath.

A throaty young tenor sang "Ride, Ride, Pagliacci," through to the sob,

anticipating it with a violent throw of body.

Then Trieste took the piano, running downward an avalanche of quick

chords, the sepia-outlined head of Auchinloss gone meanwhile from the

stage and down somewhere in the sea of dimness that rolled through the

auditorium. Lilly could see his profile etched into the twilight.

Very suddenly Zoe was downstage, and through the cymbals hitting into

Lilly's consciousness the voice finally came through to her, flowing so

easily on the beautiful, the tried old theme of Michaela's aria that she

had the feeling of great bolts of every color ribbon, winding about and

not even half un-flung as they struck the topmost places.

How true her flight!

With each fluty mount how like a bird, the line of her throat, as her

chin went up, throbbing slightly of its warbling, and from where she

stood her gaze seeming to plumb them out.

She sang through without interruption, so that when she had finished,

the timbre lay like a singing wire on the silence.

Somewhere between the ecstasy of the elbow that pressed against hers,

and the ecstasy of her child's voice still trilling on the black

silence, Lilly was conscious of movement. The gray silhouette marching

down the aisle of gloom. A group up about the piano. Another chord

struck out. Zoe's voice skipping upward in grace notes.

Vague, indeterminate passings of figures through a fluid of unreality,

like submarine life behind glass.

Then somehow they were out again into the gloom of wings and then on to

the white, incredible humdrum of the side street, standing there beside

the little door marked "Private," Bruce at her side, rather quivery at

the flanges and mopping constantly at the damp rim of his hair.

"Lilly, you've won!"

She felt sillily inclined to laugh.

"I seem to have, don't I?" she said, turning her face under pretense of

adjusting her hat, but really for fear that even a smile would induce

the threatening laughter which she knew, once let go, would slip up

beyond her control.

"She's a flute. She's a lark. She's a dream. I--I don't believe I seem

to take it in."

"Nor--I."

Later, Zoe joined them, an air of assumed composure belied by the

flaming brilliancy of her eyes and cheeks.

"Why didn't you come up afterward?" she said, forcing a commonplace,

and to Bruce, "Hail a cab, Pretty-please."

He did, helping them in and poking his head in after.

"Where?"

"Anywhere. Let it be the Park for a while, Lilly?"

She nodded.

"Is three a crowd?"

For answer she drew him in by the sleeve and on the jouncing off of the

cab was in her mother's arms, covering her cheeks with close-pressed,

audible kisses, and, after the inexplicable manner of women, both of

them crying.

"He--he didn't say much, Lilly. Kissed my hands. Told me to live

beautifully and work endlessly. Asked me if I loved poetry and painting

and sunrises and spring--a lot of stuff about the awakening of spring.

And kissed my hands again. I'm going back to-morrow. They're discussing

things now--he and _maestro_--something about a five-year contract--but

a great deal of red tape first--board meeting. I'm to be a secret until

next season, _maestro_ cried--and Auchinloss--Lilly, you need never be

afraid for me--you hear--you hear--never! We measured each other--he

called me wonder-child. Me--Zoe. Lilly--it's happened ... and you--did

it. Lilly, kiss me."

"You darling. You're like a queen. All the little lives that go into the

making of your cloth of gold, yet each proud to be ever so humble a

party to it!"

"Lilly, you're sad! On _my_ day you're sad."

"Glad! You're the meaning of everything. The road had to lead somewhere.

Everything is so clear now. You're the lovely meaning, Zoe, behind all

the circumstances that went to weave you."

Only half plumbed, Zoe sprang from her mood, flashing with all the

amazing coquetry that was so new to Lilly, around toward Bruce.

"Well--what?"

"On the very day I've found you I've lost you."

"To whom?"

"Fame."

"Nonsense!" she cried. "Don't forget the awakening of spring." And

buried her face against her mother because she had been outrageous.

Persiflage rose.

"Skylark, when I become more coherent I'll tell you how wonderful you

are."

"Zoe dear, hadn't we better drive home?"

"Lark. Lark. I cannot go home now, Lilly. Let's have a lark!"

Suddenly Bruce caught her by the dancing hands.

"Let's celebrate."

"Let's!"

"We'll dine at Sherry's, dance at the Bilt--"

"Lovely! Lovely! I've never been to either!"

"No, no, Zoe. Please! Your grandparents at home. Besides, it's war

time."

"Nonsense! Laugh while we may. Next month this time I'll probably be in

the thick of it myself. Let's laugh to-day. Vote her down, Zoe!"

"Pl-ease, Lilly."

"Your grandparents, Zoe, they don't even know the news yet--"

"Lilly, this once. Tippy and Dapples aren't going to be thrilled. They

think the whole business rather low, anyway. Besides--there's time--it's

my day--Lilly--"

"Not Sherry's, then, Zoe--a quieter--"

"Immense! I have it! Tarrytown. An opportunity to show you the place

before you go. We'll drop this taxi and pick up my car at the garage.

How's that, dinner at Tarrytown? Perfect, I'll say."

"What a duck of an idea! Oh, la, la, la, la!"

And so, quite dumbly, Lilly acquiesced and by easy shift to the

tan-upholstered car that ironed out all jolts, and a stiff breeze from

the Hudson whirring softly against their faces, they were whirling out

along quiet stretches, dusk coming down like a veil.

Seated between them, Zoe fell to singing, trilling highly and softly,

her head bared to the wind, her tam-o'-shanter on Bruce's lap, and Lilly

sitting silently by with lids down against hot eyeballs, and fighting a

sense of cross grain.

Presently lights began to come out along the river, like the gold eyes

of cats.

"How cool your fingers are, Zoe. Like the petals of something."

"Lilly, naughty man is holding back one of my hands on me."

"Lovely hands."

"Naughty man."

Silence.

"Oh dear."

"Oh dearest."

"That wasn't for you. That was a sigh."

"But I stole it."

"Cheeky."

Giggles.

Silence again and they turned off a macadamized road that was

prematurely dark with trees and into a lariat of driveway that elicited

from Zoe a squeal of enthrallment.

Even to Lilly, though she had figured in its purchase, there was

something startling in the vast classic whiteness and formal Italian

chastity of the house as they flanked it, drawing up under a

porte-cochère of Corinthian columns. Through a double row of cypresses

turning black, that inclosed a sunken garden, Dante and Virgil might

have moved, and yet, Lilly, aching with the analogy which could not

conjure, could only call up rather foolishly the three-color magazine

advertisement of a low-streamline motor car, drawn up before just such

Renaissance magnificence.

Three sheer and cunningly landscaped terraces dropped down from what was

actually the rear of the house, but which overhung the river, so that,

stepping out of the car, an unsuspected, breath-taking panorama of river

wound itself, at that moment the Albany boat moving upstream,

light-studded.

ZOE (out at a bound): "Oh! Oh! Oh! Isolde's garden. Tristan, where are

you?"

"Here."

"I want to kiss a star--that luscious one up there."

"Let me be proxy."

"Lilly, chastise him!"

She smiled at him with her tortured eyes.

"Like it?" he said, smiling back at her with something impersonal in his

eyes that deadened her. "All this formality is hardly my choice; it's

Pauline's idea."

They were met by Pauline--known to Zoe and her mother through

perfunctory office meetings. She was exceedingly petite, rather

appealingly so in her widowhood, and of her younger brother's rather

Spanish darkness, except for a graying coiffure worn high and

flatteringly.

There were seventeen years between them and yet her shoulders were

deeply white, and rose, quite unwithered, out of a jetted evening gown;

and her profile, also with the heat lightning of a scarcely perceptible

nervous quiver to it, entirely without the sag of tired flesh.

A certain petulance lent to her exceedingly well-bred diction quite a

charm, and she was playful and adoring enough to pinch each cheek of her

brother's as she tiptoed to kiss him.

"Nice boy to bring home charming people and save me from the boredom of

dining alone. How's my handsome brother? Naughty boy! It's the first

time you've looked yourself in weeks. They work him too hard down there,

Mrs. Penny. I tell my fat brother he's become little more than an

ornamental gargoyle. It's too sordid for this boy, and now you running

away from him just when I had hoped the time was ripe for him to dabble

in some of the things he's set his heart on. The kind of plays he reads

all night until I have to turn his lights out. Shame on you for

running away!"

Her twitter, from topical bough to topical bough, hardly demanded reply.

She exclaimed over Zoe, admiring her extravagantly, insisted upon

kissing away a purely imaginary look of headache from her brother's

brow, and led the way quite tinily regal, her running line of

comment unbroken.

In a soft boudoir of French grays, French doors, cerulean blues, and a

litter of every extravagant requisite of the toilet, Lilly faced herself

in a cunningly triplicated mirror.

"We're not dressed. We shouldn't have come," trying to ride down her

sense of misery.

"I'm dressed in all the cloth of gold you have woven for me," quoth Zoe,

in mock grandiloquence, still pitched to her exultant key and in all

her youthful capacity for it, full of self.

There were enamel-backed brushes with deep bristles that plowed her hair

out into dust of gold, and a finely wrought amber comb which she ran

through the fluff, striking an attitude.

"She walks in splendor like the night--"

"Zoe, you're losing your head."

"Splendor! This is me. Marble--terraces--rugs that slide--only I

want peacocks--that strut--and tails that open like fans

and--starlight--him--"

"Who?"

"Silly darling--nobody--the world--life."

There was no restraining her. She smoothed her mother's hair only to

kiss it awry again. She fluffed a fragrant cloud of powder along her

neck. Trilled at a drowsy canary in a wicker cage. Stretched herself in

the conscious pose of a Récamier on the lacy mound of a chaise-longue,

and finally followed her mother into the drawing-room, entirely at ease

in the straight blue frock.

It was a room almost the width of the house, with a balcony at one end

hung in a shah's silk prayer rug, and a stone fireplace, out of the

Davanziti palace, opposite. Three sets of leaded doors opened out on to

a flagged parapet that overlooked the Hudson and beyond the deep purple

of perfect September.

They met in a little group at one of these doors, and Lilly noticed

gratefully that Mrs. Enlow had thrown a net wrap over the formality of

her evening gown and that Bruce had merely changed to flannels.

He smiled at her with that impersonal sort of kindness which could cause

such a gush of blood to her heart, and spread himself in a playful

salaam before Zoe.

"Princess."

She held out her hand to be kissed, which he did five times, finger by

finger.

"These terraces," said Lilly, trying not to be heavy, "are like the

setting for an Aegean romance."

He smiled back at her again through the new film across his eyes.

"Write it and I'll produce it."

"Close the doors, Dicky; it's growing chilly," said Mrs. Enlow.

"Yes," said Lilly, shivering a bit, "chilly."

"And I'm burning, Dicky, Tickey Tavey," cried Zoe, applying the name

audaciously. "How can anyone be chilly on such a night as this?"

"Come, Princess, and I'll show you some stars."

"Don't wander too far before dinner, children. Mrs. Penny and I will sit

indoors. Only youth can risk swollen joints."

"Yes," said Lilly, feeling herself rather terrifiedly past the fiercer

rush of life, "only youth."

They sat on a great overstuffed divan that faced the parapet, lighted

softly at each end by the first lamps of evening.

"Why, you poor child, you're shivering of chill! It's the damp. Let me

get you a wrap."

In the thickening silence Lilly sat alone looking out through the glass

doors. Bruce and Zoe were silhouetted out there against a fathomless

evening sky that was brilliantly pointed with a few big stars. But they

were not gazing out. Her face was up to his like a flower about to be

plucked, and, looking down into it, his whole body seemed to sway to its

sweetness.

Suddenly the ache in Lilly's heart was laid. With all of her old

capacity for the incongruous, but without any of her usual pump of

terror, she thought suddenly of her father, two nights hence, sitting

down to the creamed salmon and fried potatoes on Page Avenue, hanging

his napkin with the patent fasteners about his neck. Edna Shriner

must teach her that French-knot stitch for Zoe's gowns--in

case--heigh-ho!--in case--

With her gaze on those two etched and eloquent profiles, a piercing

sense of achievement seemed to flow with a warm rush of blood, curing

her of chill.

Her heart beat high with what even might have been fulfillment.

THE END