Star-Dust by Fannie HurstThe Story of an American Girl (page 4)

“Ballman is a great voice builder, but he doesn’t concern himself with the future of his pupils. He’s a dear old fogy with a single-track mind.”

“What did he used to say of your sister?”

“Nothing much except that he used to call her his wonder-child and shut up like a clam when we tried to discuss her future with him. What you need now, if you’re ever really going to get anywhere, is an audition.”

“Audition?”

“One of the big opera directors to hear you. It’s not easy to arrange at the Metropolitan. Ballman has no pull. It takes a man like Auchinloss or Trieste or one of the big guns.”

“If only I could get started, Miss Neugass, on the right track!”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. When Auchinloss comes this winter I’ll have him hear you. That may pave the way to something. He’s the prince of them all. His judgment never fails. He’s only stamped his approval on five or six, but he’s never missed. They say he heard Paula Anchutz singing her baby to sleep one night as he happened to pass her cottage, and he rang her door bell.”

“Auchinloss discovered Paula Anchutz!”

“He decided her greatness after a few bars. Some day I’ll read you Millie’s letter home about her audition in Vienna. After about six bars of the ‘Jewel Song’ he leaped up over the footlights, screamed at her, kissed her, drew up a chair, and began to plan out the entire campaign of her future, so rapidly that the poor child said everything was swinging in circles before her.”

Her eyes two flaming orbits, Lilly sat staring, her lips slightly open.

“And that was the beginning.”

“Yes, that was the beginning of–everything,” said Miss Neugass, with a twist on her lips.

“Oh, I–Even to hear it thrills me so that I–Thrills me so! But what, Miss Neugass–what if he hadn’t–“

“That is where you must make up your mind to take your medicine. There’s an article about him in this month’s _Musical Gazette_. If he thinks you’ve the stuff great singers are made of, it’s a repetition of his scene with Millie every time. But this article goes on to say, if he rubs his hands together and says, ‘Very nice,’ and walks off, that means he thinks you will probably make a better bookkeeper or baby dandler than you will a prima donna. Millie used to write that around the opera house in Vienna, when Auchinloss started rubbing his hands together after an audition, everybody used to have the smelling salts ready.”

“Miss Neugass–you’ve heard me practice. Tell me the truth! Do you think my ambition is bigger than my voice? Tell me as you would your sister.”

The veil of a pause hung between them, Miss Neugass unfolding her legs and letting them hang over the side of the bed, as if she would flee the moment.

“Why, I’m no critic, Miss Parlow. All I inherit is some of my father’s natural musical instinct.”

“You’re evading me, like Ballman does! Tell me! You may save me as you saved yourself. Am I chasing a phantom?”

“I swear to you I don’t know. I like your voice. I think it has a beautiful rich quality. I agree with Ballman, it has fine timbre.”

“Timbre–I’m tired hearing that–“

“That counts in voice almost as much as range.”

“No, no, don’t evade. You think it lacks range?”

“I don’t know. It lacks something–as if–well, if you’ll pardon my saying it, as if it didn’t reach as far as your temperament could fling it.”

“That’s it exactly! I feel that about myself in everything–almost as if–as if it would take another generation of me to complete me–if–if you get what I mean.”

“There is something in that.”

“I know what you think in your heart. I’m a vaudeville product with a grand-opera aspiration.”

“I’m not capable of judging.”

“You judged your sister.”

“Ah, but Millie’s voice there was no mistaking. Her talent needed hardly to be developed. It opened naturally, like a rose. Nine voices out of ten have to be drilled for like precious ore. Just you study on. I’ll have Auchinloss hear you when he comes over.”

“You’re sure, Miss Neugass, they’re coming?”

“That’s what the papers keep saying. She’s to sing three operas in January, with Auchinloss conducting. We’re expecting daily to hear from my sister, verifying it.”

“You don’t know–exactly?”

“No.”

“If only–You don’t think it will be this side of January? You see, after January my–my plans may be uncertain.”

“I understand. He’s to conduct his own symphony in December, to be played the first time in this country, somewhere around Christmas in Boston, I think.”

“Will you be wanting this room then?”

Miss Neugass swung her face with its considerable dip of nose toward Lilly.

“You don’t think this place will hold Millie any more? You don’t think, for instance, the great Du Gass could receive the reporters–here!”

“But, after all, it’s her home.”

A levelness of expression came down over the face of Miss Neugass, as if a shade had been lowered across it, her voice, too, leveled of any inflection.

“Of course,” she said, “you know about my sister and–Auchinloss.”

“You mean–“

“Oh, I realize everybody knows–that is, everybody except my parents.”

“I didn’t–“

“That’s because you don’t belong yet! Wait until you’ve worked your way in a bit. I’ve known it long enough. Two years.”

“Then she–you–“

“She was a baby when she left, Miss Parlow. Even if there had been the money to send me along with her, we wouldn’t have felt the need of it. I could have staked my life on that child. Not that I’m blaming her, only I–God! I could have staked my life.”

“He’s–“

“Already married. She wrote me the whole story two years ago. It’s an old one. So old it’s got barnacles. I sometimes wonder it came to me with the terrible shock it did. She was so young–too young to get ahead so quickly even with her gifts. He has a son almost her age. He’s forty and she’s twenty. The wife in an insane asylum somewhere outside of Paris. Our Millie! I don’t think I even realize it yet. Beauty and the Beast they call them in Milan.”

“Horrible!”

“That baby. The whole world before her. It was all with her or nothing, she wrote, and she chose all. She sang six leading roles that first year. It made her. I–I don’t blame her, somehow–that baby. It’s him I hate. Sometimes I wonder how I’m going to hold back, when I lay hands on him, from–killing. But I won’t. I’ll grin and bear it just as if her beautiful little white self were no more to me than an alabaster vase after it’s cracked.”

“And your parents?”

“That’s all she writes of, now that she thinks she is coming, to keep it from them! I wake up nights in a cold sweat over it. Wringing wet with the fear of my job.”

“Your mother and sweet little old father!”

“That’s it; they’re like two babes in the woods morally. They don’t know any gradation except black and white. Virtue and sin. A woman is good or a woman is rotten bad. She falls or she doesn’t.”

“Oh, I know the relentlessness of that single-track code of right and wrong.”

“My stepmother, good soul that she is, would take the last stitch off her back for what she calls honest need, but I’ve seen her slam the door in the face of one of our neighbor girls in trouble who’s come to my father begging for help–medicine. That’s what I’m up against, Miss Parlow, keeping from those two old people what their daughter–is.”

“Oh, my dear, my dear!”

“I don’t know why I’m airing my troubles here. God knows you are bottled up enough about yours, if you have any, but I thought surely you knew. Everyone does. Is it any wonder that my sister’s home-coming is a nightmare to me? She doesn’t want to come; I can read between the lines of her letter she’s fighting it. But you see, Auchinloss is a great man. He’s been invited to conduct his own symphony at its American _première_ and naturally has taken this opportunity to bring about her American debut. You can imagine my parents’ pride.”

“I can see it. Why, your father can’t keep his face straight–he’s always sort of smiling, slyly, to himself.”

“Their daughter, Millie du Gass, coming home with an opera triumph back of her in every European city, the great Auchinloss himself coming to conduct for her American debut. That is the kind of homecoming they’re looking forward to and the kind I must make possible for them. My mother, who screams out every girl in trouble who dares to come into the drug store for help!”

When Lilly bade Alma Neugass good night, they kissed, a dark bony hand lingering on each of Lilly’s shoulders.

“You’ve your decision before you yet, Miss Parlow, and you’re young and pretty, too. Much as I love that little sister of mine, and can’t find it in my heart to blame her, I know that somewhere there are women big enough not to have to pay the price. You–there’s something about you–something so, if you’ll permit me to say it, so boyish–so clean–so wholesome. You should be big enough not to have to pay the price.”

“If only I felt that your sister–cared. That is so horrible–the beauty-and-the-beast part. To place personal ambition above her body–the body that holds her soul! Ugh!”

“She sent his picture. He’s hairy like an ape. My. little white sister–he’s–hairy, I tell you, like an ape.”

“I think I would have to want something–love something–enough to tear out my very heart for it before I could pay her price. Nothing on earth, Miss Neugass, can be so hideous–as that! I–I imagine it’s flying in the face of the first law of nature–nothing so hideous as giving of self to–in–in–payment–“

Tears were racking the worn form of Miss Neugass, Lilly wrapping her in arms that soothed.

“You musn’t,” she said; “you’ve your big job ahead of you.”

Through the left wall came a sharp trilogy of raps.

“All right, ma. Coming!” cried Miss Neugass, starting up instantly, her voice lifted and absolutely without tremor.

That night Lilly dreamed the whole of her marriage. Her father with his face distorted by lather before his shaving mirror. The Leffingwell Rock Church. Little Evelyn Kemble placing the white-satin cushion. Herself and Albert finally locking the door of their new little home that wedding night.

It was then she awoke with a scream.

CHAPTER XX

About a week later an advertisement in a morning paper caught Lilly’s eye.

WANTED:–Refined young woman of good appearance and soprano voice, to sing in music store. Must be able to accompany self. Apply between twelve and six. Broadway Melody Shop, 1432 Broadway.

A recurring and dragging sense of lassitude was over her these mornings, so that it was all she could do to drag herself through two hours of practice in the parlor, scrupulously given over by Mrs. Neugass, who moved constantly and audibly about the kitchen.

Her lessons, one every Tuesday morning, with Leopold Ballman, were tiresome unmusical periods of diaphragm exercises and an entire tearing down and reconstruction process of the previous methods taught her. It was tedious, standing before the long gold-and-black pier glass in the front parlor, watching the tendinous rise and fall of her lower thorax when her forbidden arias were on top of the piano and a cabinet of Millie du Gass’s sheet music bulged there at her disposal.

The old disturbing ache would climb up to the back of her neck, and her half-baked power of concentration falter at the arid monotony of, breathe-in; breathe-out.

There were about five months between Lilly and the hour of her supreme travail. They might have been five years, while she paused suspended, as it were, in this state of abeyance that hung between the hot August day of her leave-taking of home and that chimeric hour ahead which depended like a stalactite, stabbing space.

Her most tangible concern was a money one. The breaking of another one-hundred-dollar bill was imminent and it frightened her. She reduced her vocal lessons, at three dollars the hour, to one every other week, finally discontinuing entirely, and took to haunting the agencies daily, leaving her address where no initial charges were required and scanning incessantly the want advertisements under Amusements.

She applied one Monday morning at the Broadway Melody Shop, a mere aisle wedged between a theater and a _rôtisserie_, a megaphone inserted through a hole cut in the plate-glass frontage that was violently plastered over with furiously colored copies of what purported to be the latest song hits: “If I Could Be Molasses to Your Griddle Cakes.” “Snuggle Up, Snookums.” “Honey, Does You Love Me?” “Cakin’ the Walk.” “It’s Twilight on the Tiber.” “Tu-Lips for Mine!”

A sort of managerial salesman in a number-thirteen-and-a-half collar and a part that ran through his varnished-looking hair bisecting the back of his head like a poodle’s, and a soft, pimply jowl that had never borne beard, stuck up a random sheet of music on the piano, so placed that its tones carried straight through the megaphone to the sidewalk.

She played and sang it off easily, her tones jaunty and staccato and her desire to please quivering through them. He stood beside her, the angle of his body so that the sharp bone of his hip pressed against her.

“Rag up,” he said once, insinuating the movement with a slight wriggle that ran through his apparently rigid body. She quickened her speed, leaning forward to read more surely:

“Uh-uh! my ba-a-aaby,
You drive me cra-azy,
Uh-uh! quit shovin’,
I’m only lov–in’.”

The words running along to a stuttering syncopation that filled her with self-disgust as she sang them. But she finished with quite a flourish, swinging around on the stool to face him.

“You need ragging up, kiddo. You’ve the speed of a funeral march.”

“A little practice is what I need,” she said, half hoping to obtain.

“I’ll try you at fifteen a week. Eleven to six Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. The other evenings we close at eleven; fifty cents extra for supper money. You on?”

“Yes.”

“Slick, ain’t you? Who peeled you to-day, Miss Bermuda Onion? Aw, touchy! No harm meant. You’re too big to suit me; I like ’em squab size. Rag up a bit between now and to-morrow, Miss Onion.”

For five weeks in the little slit of store that was foul with tired and devitalized air, and concealed behind a screen that shut off the megaphone device, Lilly sang through an eight and sometimes a twelve-hour day, her voice drifting out to the sidewalk with a remote calling quality.

To her relief she quickly learned that Mr. Alphonse Rook–“Phonzie”–spent the greater part of his time at the office of the Manhattan Music Publishing Company, under which auspices the Broadway Melody Shop operated.

He was replaced by a salesgirl of such superlative dress and manner that her long jet earrings were like exclamations at the audacity of her personality. An habitual counter line-up of Broadway mental brevities in the form of young men with bamboo sticks and eyes with perpetual ogles in them, would while away the syncopated hours with her, occasionally Lilly emerging from behind her screen to “come up for air,” as Miss Gertrude Kirk put it.

She was “Gert” to the boys, and from the propinquity of that sliver of store and the natural loquacity of Miss Kirk, which would have overflowed a much more generous area, Lilly was to learn much of life as it is lived on that bias which is cut against the warp and woof of society. Miss Kirk had twice been up in night court. Her mother alternated under three aliases and was best known on the night boat that plied between New York and Albany. Occasionally this mother visited upon her daughter, her laughter hitting through the store like cymbals. She had the sagging flesh of an old fowl and cheeks that had not been cleansed of rouge long enough for the pores to breathe in and keep the flesh alive. To Lilly she was as terrible as a plucked hen on a butcher’s block, with her head dyed to a vicious cock’s-comb red and the wattles of loose skin beneath her chin.

In fact, she was familiarly known around the shop as “old bird,” and on one occasion had invited Lilly for a Sunday excursion “up to Albany.”

“Lay off, ma,” said her daughter. “Fer Gossake, can’t you take a tumble?”

Miss Kirk’s tongue was as nimble as her fingers. She used them both lightly. Would tear the flounce off her too lacy petticoat to bind up a messenger boy’s cut finger, and no scarf-pin that came within three feet of her was immune from her quick touch. The only hour that ever struck for her was sex o’clock. The unmentionable lay mentioned in her discourse so frequently that to Lilly the Broadway Melody Shop became a slimy-sided vat, horrible with small-necked young men with flexible canes and Gertrude Kirk’s slit-eyed stare of calculation.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to put over, Lilly-of-the-valley; you’re one too many for me. But I’d stake my life on one thing.”

“What?”

“You got a caul over your face.”

“A what?”

“Caul. Sort of veil some get born with. I know a girl carried hers around in a little wooden box for luck. Well, you got that white-veil kind of look that would blacklist you for the Vestal Virgin Sextet. I can pick ’em every time. You look to me like–say, I got a little mud puddle of my own to play in without wetting my feet in yours.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lilly, crashing out the opening bars of “Oh, Willie, I love you when you’re silly.”

“No?” said Miss Kirk, the slit-eyed stare of terrible sophistication narrowing down to two blade edges.

That night Lilly eyed herself in all the plate-glass windows as she walked to the car. She was straight as a lance, but before she went to bed she readjusted the gathers of her skirt band, pushing them forward.

One evening, because she saw it in the window of one of the Amsterdam Avenue petty shops, she bought, furtively, a baby dress with a little nursery legend embroidered on the yoke. She stole home with the package up under her coat, like a thief. Once in her room, she laid it out on the bed. It was as tiny as the French apron of the French maid who opens the play, and as sheer. She wanted suddenly to finger it, and did, laying her cheek to it with a rushing sense of sweetness, and then suddenly, on wild lashing tears of her resentment and terror, her hands tightening into and wringing it. Dragging the suitcase out from beneath her bed, she crammed in the little garment, and finally, strapping down the lid again, laid her head against it, silently screaming her despair.

Strangely enough, that very night, long after the street noises had thinned and she had heard Isaac Neugass, creeping up from the drug store, drag the bolt across the apartment door, Lilly sat suddenly up in bed out of a hot tossing period of light doze. She was often crying unconsciously into her sleep these nights, so that her eyes were tear-bitten and dilated into the darkness. The night bell that connected from the drug store was gouging the silence with a long-sustained grilling. Soft-soled feet were already padding down the hallway past her door, a bolt withdrawn, then voices.

The grunty tones of Mr. Neugass and a woman’s fast soprano that rose and rent the silence like the tear of silk. More feet down the hallway; sobs that were filled with coughing; Mrs. Neugass, pitched high in the key of termagency; the faint, expostulatory voice of Alma Neugass; and finally one throat-torn sob that grated like a buzz saw against the night and the banging, reverberating slam of a door.

Barefooted, trembling in the chill, Lilly peered out into the hallway, the grotesque procession returning down its length. Mr. Neugass bent to his tired angle, nightshirt striking him midships as it were, the two dim white women creeping after.

“What has happened?”

“It’s nodding, Miss Parlow. It’s a shame for decent beoble they should have to listen. Wash your ears out of it, Alma, and go back to bed.”

But instead, to Lilly’s importuning arm, Miss Neugass slid into her room, closing the door softly behind her, standing there shivering in the blue kind of darkness.

“It’s the old story,” she said–“some girl in a fix and trying to get pa to help her. It makes me sick, positively sick.”

“A fix?”

“Every once in a while some poor creature comes begging pa to break the law and help her. It gets him wild. Any girl who doesn’t want her child is a monster and every girl in trouble a vicious sinner. This poor little thing didn’t look seventeen; I couldn’t quite understand her. A Pole, I think. Something about the beach at Coney Island. A man she’d never seen before or since. My mother in her righteousness! Her terrible, untempted righteousness. Her easy righteousness. The law in its righteousness. It can be just as wrong and horrible to have children as it can be sublime. What right has that little underbred girl to bring an illegitimate life into the world? The law doesn’t provide for the illegitimate child. Why should it provide for its birth? What right had my father to withhold his help? … There are worse crimes than taking human life; one of them is to give life under such conditions.”

“You mean, Alma, there’s a way not to–a way out?”

“Why, you poor baby! Of course there is if you see to it in time. That is, during the first few weeks.”

“How–many?”

“Oh, five or six at the outside. Go back to bed, girl; you’ll catch your death. O Lordy! such is life!” And went out.

For the third time in her life, Lilly fainted that night, standing shivering in her nightdress for a second after Miss Neugass had left. In a room barely wide enough to contain her length she dropped softly against the bed, and, her fall broken, slid the remaining distance to the floor.

After a while the chill air from the open window revived her and she crept shudderingly into bed.

CHAPTER XXI

Two weeks before Christmas such a gale of house-cleaning swept through the Neugass apartment that the scoured smell of pine-wood floors and the scrubbed taste of damp matting lurked at the very threshold.

Then one Sunday morning Mlle. Millie du Gass and maid, also Felix G. Auchinloss, were registered at the Waldorf.

All that day there wound into Lilly’s room the aroma of fowl simmering in their juices, the quick hither and thither of feet down the hallway, and later the whirring of an ice-cream freezer and the quick fork-and-china click of egg whites in the beating. For days she had hardly glimpsed the family, except as they passed her on excited little comings and goings, and always package-laden. A strip of new hall carpet appeared, Miss Neugass nailing it down one night, calling out short, excited orders through a mouthful of tacks. The piano had been tuned.

A sense of delicacy kept Lilly to her room that bright cold Sunday. She did her breathing exercises; washed out some handkerchiefs and stockings; tightened the buttons on a pretty new brown coat with a touch of modish stone-martin fur at the collar which she had purchased, not without qualms, for twenty-seven dollars and a half, at an advertised sale.

Then for two long immobile hours she sat with her cheeks crumpled into her palms, staring out across the sun-washed roofs and roofs.

At noon she took in a bottle of milk from the window sill, thawed it, slid a hatpin along the wrapping of a new tin of biscuit. She alternated between bites and sips, sitting on the bed edge, her gaze into the design of the wall paper.

At home they must be sitting down to dinner, her father adjusting his napkin by the patent fasteners and tilting back his head for the invariable preamble of throwing the contents of his water tumbler down at a gulp. Her mother in the hebdomadal polka-dotted foulard, her bangs frizzed. Albert gnawing close to the drumstick, jaws working.

As a matter of fact, just that scene was at just that moment in its enactment, and in all the fullness of her intuition she now knew it as unerringly as if it had flowed in replica to her through time and space, etching itself in dry point into her consciousness.

How often and with uncanny fidelity to fact her retroactive state of mind had guided her step by step over the site of the domestic disaster.

Her parents’ home, reaching around like an amoeba, inclosing Albert in living walls. The slow readjustment, dumfounded rage, and despair simmering gradually to bitterness and hardening finally to despair. The soft, sensitive ground of their sorrow constantly spongy with the wellsprings of grief beneath, but the surface bubbles showing less and less, and ultimately a hard dryness setting in. Her heart would hurt as tangibly as if the surface of her body were red with a wound from it, yet, sitting there at her milk and biscuit, her gaze into the monotonous repetition of wall-paper design, the thought of that Sunday dinner out there, with its invariable roast chicken, bread stuffing, candied sweet potatoes, and lemon-meringue pie; the Sunday-afternoon lethargy; the hypothenuse of her father asleep in his chair, the newspaper over his face; Albert, the celluloid toothpick moving along his lips, puttering around at favorite locks and bells; the mere visualization was such a fillip to her present that she lay back on the bed, stretching her arms and legs like a great, luxurious cat, her lips curved to a smile.

At five o’clock, as she lazed there, Alma Neugass burst in without the usual scrupulously observed preamble of a knock. There were two round spots of color out on her long cheeks, and her white cotton shirt waist, always bearing the imprint of sleeve protectors, was replaced by a dark-blue silk of candy-stripe plaid, with a standing collar of lace that fell in a jabot down the front, held there by an ivory hand of a brooch. There was something of the mausoleum about poor Alma, the grim skeleton of her everyday personality finding but icy warmth beneath the ivory, lace, and the seldom-warn black broadcloth skirt that was pinned over two inches at the waistline to hold it up.

“Did you think I’d forgotten you? I haven’t–but it’s been such a rush.”

She sat down on a chair edge, pressing a bony hand to her brow.

“You poor thing, you’re dead tired.”

“They’re here, you know. Docked this morning, almost twenty-four hours ahead of schedule. They–they would have come up immediately, but customs detained them three hours. They are at the hotel now and won’t be up until supper. It’s all so confusing. The reporters and photographers on their trail. He won’t let anyone at her until she’s rested. I talked to him over the telephone. His voice is–hairy.”

“I’ve never seen you look so nice, Miss Neugass.”

“If I stop to think, I’ll scream.”

“Then you mustn’t stop, dear.”

“You should see my father; he can’t sit still. I never realized how little and–old he’s getting until I put his black suit on him. He’s so full of pride he–Oh, what a mockery–for him to dare to come here–home–with her.”

“Miss Neugass–this is not the time. Not now.”

A cocaine sort of courage seemed to lock her face back into its rather nondescript immobility.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m acting like a fool,” and rose. “What I came in to say, get into that little pink dress of yours about nine-thirty and I may be able to manage it for you to-night. Two minutes of his time may mean everything to you and nothing to him.”

Lilly flashed to her feet.

“To-night!”

“Keep your head. Sing the ‘Jewel Song.’ It’s always a good, showy standby. Let go–the way I heard you practice the other Sunday morning–and forget that it’s Auchinloss or anyone else listening to you.”

“No, no, not to-night, Miss Neugass. I–I’m not prepared. It’s too sudden.”

“It’s as good as any other time. Besides, to-night we have him here, and there is no telling when we will again. This isn’t what you would call the ideal headquarters for a pair of celebrities. I suppose, if the truth is known, Millie dreads bringing him here at all. Besides, they leave to-morrow for Boston, and with the line-up of entertainments the newspapers say are planned for them, there is no telling when we will get him alone again.”

“I’m not in voice these days. It’s all roughened up since I’m singing downtown. I–oh, I’m not ready to-night, Miss Neugass.”

“Nonsense! Don’t ask Opportunity to wait outside when he knocks. He may move on and not return.”

“I–I’m so frightened. I’ve such–such odds against me–right now. What if he only rubs his hands and says, ‘very nice’? What if–“

“That’s where you’ll have to swallow your medicine. After all, even the great Auchinloss represents only one man’s opinion.”

“But his judgment has proved itself–time and time again.”

“That’s why you have the chance to-night that comes once in a lifetime. Take it.”

“I will!”

CHAPTER XXII

It was just before midnight, after a four-hour period of waiting in the pink mull dress, when came the summons which brought Lilly into the presence of Felix Auchinloss.

Cramped from the long period of taut waiting, she was so dry of throat that in spite of constantly sipped water she could only gulp her reply to Miss Neugass’s knock and eagerly inserted head.

“Quick! He’ll hear you now before they leave.” She followed her, without a word, down the hallway and into a front parlor brilliant with the full-flare gas jets, a bisque angel in the attitude of swinging dangling from the chandelier, and, swimming in the dance, a circle of faces.

“Miss Parlow, this is my sister, Millie du Gass.”

A Greek chorus could have swayed to the epiphany in Millie’s voice.

With her short bush of curls, little aquiline profile true to her father’s, tilted upward, as if sniffing the aerial scent, her slender figure Parisienne to outlandishness, the stream of Millie’s ancestry flowed through the tropics of her very exotic personality. She was the magnolia on the family tree, the bloom on a century plant that was heavy with its first bud. Even at this time, slightly before her internationalism as a song bird was to carry her name to the remote places of the earth, a little patina of sophistication had set in, glazing her over and her speech, which carried the whir of three acquired languages.

“And this is Doctor Auchinloss. I’ve told him about you and your eagerness for a foothold. He’s going to give you a little home-made audition. Will you hear Miss Parlow now, Doctor Auchinloss?”

The face of Felix Auchinloss, also to become familiar through subsequent years of American dictatorship, seemed by the hirsute vagary of a black beard joining up _via_ sideburns with a Pompadour of sooty black, to peer through a porthole. It did just that. A face in window looking out with very quick perceptions which ruffled it not at all, upon a world that came to him chiefly through two channels, his supernaturally attuned hearing and his palate.

He could detect a slurred note of the sixteenth violin in the crash of a ninety-piece ensemble of orchestration, and one-eighth-of-a-second miscalculation of his two-minute egg could embroil a breakfast table. A creature of elbows and knees, such as a chimpanzee is, the backs of his hands were hairy, but the eye seldom strayed from his face. It knew its Huxley, that face, its Hegel and its Kant. It loved the smoothness of young girls’ bodies. It was attuned to the music of the spheres. It could hold in leash the outrageous temperaments that responded to his baton and look with impassivity, even cruelty, upon torture. Mostly the torture of women. Also it could brighten out of its imperturbability at the steaming sight of a dish of _sauerbraten_.

There had been no _sauerbraten_ on Mrs. Neugass’s festive board, rather fowl, in a white glue of gravy and great creamy dumplings, and under three helpings and the steady pour of an extra lager the great Auchinloss had expanded and expounded.

His glance, still warmed, took in Lilly at a sweep finding resting place at the swell of her bosom.

There was something about Lilly as she stood thereof the winglike smoothness of a little wild duck, wet from a skim across water. A slick and pale kind of beauty which ordinarily held little appeal for him except that her bosom was very white. Very, very white, he thought.

“Zoprano?” he asked, his gaze still beneath her chin.

“Lyric soprano.”

“Om-m-m-m!” After the manner of having his doubts.

“You accompany her, Felix,” said Miss du Gass, not unkindly and actually with an intensive kind of eagerness, as if for the diverting of his interest.

He seated himself at the piano, his great knees at a wide stride, hands riding down the keyboard in an avalanche of improvised octaves.

In black silk that stood away from her, Mrs. Neugass sat by, not releasing hold of Millie’s hand, her eyes as if they could never finish their feast of her. Her timidity forbade her much that she would say, and so she sat smilingly silent and held the little ring-littered hand, stroked it and lay it to her cheek. To Lilly, who had never seen her out of the cotton-stuff uniform of housewife, it seemed to her that something of her Old Testament beauty had died beneath the bunchy jetted taffeta that brought out in her the look of peasant–her husband in camphoric broadcloth suffering the same demotion.

“Now doan’ get egcited,” said Mr. Neugass, himself shaken of voice. “Remember it is home folks.”

“She’s all right, pa, if you don’t make her nervous,” said Miss Neugass, seating herself stiffly on a stiff chair, her face, as the evening wore on, cold of its flush, and tired rings coming out beneath her eyes.

“What do you prefer to sing?” asked Millie du Gass, again, kindly.

“The ‘Jewel Song.'”

On her words the opening bars crashed out, and, to Lilly’s consternation, far too rapidly, so that she ran with her breath, as it were, for the opening notes, lifting to it nicely, however, and, by miracle, quite at her truest.

The state of her invariable vocal exultation began to mount, her consciousness of scene to recede, and, anticipating her coloratura climax, she started to climb, building for warble. Her blood was pounding and her voice in flight. Up went her chin. It was then Felix Auchinloss swung on the stool, snipping off the song like a thread, his face in its window, full of a new impassivity, and this time his eyes off somewhere behind Lilly’s left ear.

“That is verra nize,” he said, moving restlessly about the room as if to throw off an irksome moment, and then winding his hands and winding them, “a pretty voice as far as it goes, and verra, verra nize.”

There was a silence that seemed to wait, and Millie du Gass, her laugh like glass beads falling from a snapped chain:

“You must come down to the hotel, dear, some day, where I’ve a concert grand. This darling old tin pan! You should have seen, Felix, the way pops used to make me practice on it, rapping me over the knuckles. You old darling pops!”

“Papa’s baby-la,” he said, pinching her cheek.

“If you will excuse me now, please, I–won’t, intrude any longer.”

“Good night, dear; it was just lovely. Good night,” joined in everybody, too kindly.

Walking out of that room, Lilly was conscious suddenly of passing through a prolonged stare, especially from Mrs. Neugass, who leaned forward slightly in her chair–a stare that prompted her somehow to quicken her departure almost to a run.

* * * * *

Out of a night that had flowed around her in a bitter sort of blackness that fairly threatened to drown her, she floated up toward morning to an exhausted doze, her face tear-lashed and her breathing sucked in sobbily as she slept.

It was out of this that she awoke suddenly to a bombardment of knocks at her door.

“Come!” she cried, sitting up rather alarmedly in bed, and holding the blanket over her chest. She was lovely and disheveled with sleep, her whiteness whiter because of the most delicately darkened oyster shells beneath her eyes.

It was Mrs. Neugass. She was pleasantly shapeless again in cotton stuff, her bosom bulging down and over the jerked-in apron strings.

“Wait, I’ll get up and close the window, Mrs. Neugass!”

“You doan’ need to,” she said, slamming down the window herself, opening the floor register, and seating herself rigidly on the chair that faced the bed. “I want a little talk with you, blease.”

“Why, yes, Mrs. Neugass!” A wave of memory and a sense of physical misery swept over Lilly so that it was difficult for her to force the smile. But she did, sitting up in bed and hugging her knees with bare shining arms.

With nervousness patent in every move, Mrs. Neugass sat forward, pleating and unpleating a little section of her apron.

“I guess you know it, Miss Lilly, that with all the honors we got by our daughter, we’re still blain, respegtable beoble.”

“Of course–“

“For fifteen years in one business in one neighborhood we’ve such a standing that from three blocks around they come to my husband he should keep their savings. My girls–I can say it on a bible–more than anything around them was always respegtability.”

“But why–“

“If I’m mistaken, Miss Luella, and blease God I should be, then excuse me for a foolish old woman, but is–is everything all right with you, Miss Luella?”

“Mrs. Neugass, I–What do you mean?”

“I took you in for a student, a girl alone from her home town, but not once since you’re with us–I can’t help it I got eyes–so much as a postal card. All right, I said time and time again to my husband, she don’t have friends to come and call on her, because she’s a stranger in New York. Neither did my Millie have so many friends, I guess, the first few weeks in Munich. But no letters–not a line! I know _goys_ ain’t so strong on family ties, but once in a while a letter–“

“I don’t quite see where the matter of my correspondence can be of interest to you, Mrs. Neugass.”

“No, but it is of interest to me if everything is all right with you. If everything is over and above-board, as the saying is, Miss Luella!”

There was a throb to the silence, as she sat upright there in bed, that seemed to shape itself about her, like a trap. She buried her face suddenly into her hands.

Then Mrs. Neugass rose, edging around the back of her chair as if to get clear of even propinquity.

“I’m right?” she cried, hoarsely and rather coarsely. “I’m right, then? I took into my home a bad girl?”

“No!–No!–No!–“

Out of bed, her feet hastily into slippers and fumbling into her kimono so that the flow of her hair went down inside it, Lilly approached Mrs. Neugass, her gesture toward her and entreating.

“Mrs. Neugass, you’re horribly wrong in what you suspect. You must listen to me–“

“You can exblain nothing to me except to get your clothes packed. How it goes to show you never can tell beoble from looks. Even my husband, who never gets deceived in human nature, ‘She’s a refined, intelligent girl to have around,’ he says. My stepdaughter! A girl I am as careful with as if she was still eighteen, should go out of her way to get you before Auchinloss! No wonder he says it you are limited and that you fall just short of fine talent. You don’t deserve it no better. Ain’t you ashamed? You bad girl, you! I’m only sorry for the mother you say you got–your poor mother!”

“Mrs. Neugass, this is outrageous! You haven’t the right to speak to me like this! It was wrong, I admit, to–to deceive you. But I had my reasons–you wouldn’t have taken me in. I’m not what–what you think I am!”

“I don’t care what you are and what you ain’t. I only want you to pack your bags and go.”

“I won’t go until you’ve heard me out!”

“We’re respegtable beoble!”

“Oh, I know, Mrs. Neugass, your kind of respectability. I was reared on it. It’s the cruelest respectability in the world. It has no outlook except through the narrow little bars of the small decencies you have erected about yourselves.”

“That fine talk don’t save a girl’s skin when she’s in such a fix like you!”

“I’ve more claims to your precious kind of respectability than you–than you think!”

“I don’t _think_ no more. I know! I don’t say it’s the nicest thing I should have looked once through your things. Even then I must have felt it in my bones. That little dress with the nursery rhyme on the yoke–how it was I didn’t get suspicious then? All of a sudden last night, though–even while you was singing, it come over me, all these weeks I must have been blind.”

“I tell you I’m a married woman. I was married last July in the Leffingwell Rock Church in St.–in a city I don’t care to name. I suppose that constitutes me a moral woman in your world of cautious morality. But in my eyes I’m a moral leper. Not because I did not marry, but because I did. Married for every reason in the world except love. No marriage ceremony in the world can condone the immorality of that! Society may, but God doesn’t. From your point of view, then, I’m a respectable woman. From mine, I’m rotten.”

“I don’t know what it is you’re talking aboud. If you are what you say you are, what does it mean living around in decent beoble’s houses in a condition like yours? It’s an insult to my daughters you should be here. The right kind of a married woman don’t live around New York in such a way like you. There is something very crooked in the woodpile.”

“If that is what bothers you, won’t you please, dear Mrs. Neugass, sit down and let me tell you the whole story? I need you–“

“The whole story, Miss–Mrs. Parlow–or whatever it is you call yourself–ain’t what bothers me. All I want is you should go while my husband is down in his store and my daughter in her position. I am ashamed they should know. I’m lucky yet I saved myself from having a disgrace in the house a few weeks from now.”

“Oh, Mrs. Neugass, be careful! You may have cause some day to–“

“A singer she wants to be! Is it any wonder, miss, you got no luck? A girl like you don’t deserve it. I’m sorry enough for your poor mother. Married or no married, I want you should leave here. Quick, you bad girl, you! I’ll wait outside till you go.”

So Lilly was subjected to the bitter, the unspeakably vulgar humiliation of gathering her belongings like any culprit servant girl, cramming them, blind with tears and frenzy, into the suitcase and valise, tears scalding down and rolling over her hands as she dressed.

As she staggered finally down the hallway, the two bags grating the walls and her hat awry from haste, Mrs. Neugass stood at the door, holding it open.

“Here,” she said, “is your rent back for four days–“

“Don’t you dare, Mrs. Neugass, to offer me that! Only let me out, please, from this outrageous predicament.”

“You got righd. It is a outrageous predicament. Ach! shame on you! Such a fine, clean-looking girl like you. Indeed, you don’t got to ask to be let out twice.”

Thirty minutes later, and because her wildly beating brain could figure out no alternative, Lilly sat on a bench in the waiting room of the Grand Central Station, bags at her feet, trying to subdue her state of trembling.

Eleven o’clock moved around largely on the station clock. She was due at the Broadway Melody Shop. Still she sat on, the palpitating surface of her gradually slowing its throb. The reverberating terminal, then at the excavating state of its gigantic reconstruction, rang to the crash of steel with the fantastic echo of tunnel and of blasting. Its constant conglomerate of footfalls reduced to the common denominator of a gigantic shuffle, it swelled toward the noonday schedule, with more and more rapid comings and goings. A light snow was announcing itself in little white powderings across overcoat shoulders and in the crevices of derbys.

The new brown coat enveloped her warmly enough, but she shivered as she sat, at the same time committing the paradox of unbuttoning and flinging its double-breastedness away from the beating of her very being. After a while she gave over her bags to the obliging eye of a shawled Polish girl on the bench beside her and crossed to the Information Bureau. A clerk gave her precedence over two men.

Yes, there was a St. Louis train out at two-five. Another at six.

She returned and sat in the midst of a third bustling hour. A young woman with an infant, and a whole archipelago of luggage surrounding her, finally replaced the Polish girl. She was as fadely and straggily pretty as a doll that has been left lying on the lawn throughout a night of heavy dews. Every so often the tiny head would spring back from the soft fount of her breasts, a cry rising thin and spiral as smoke.

“Sh-h-h, baby! He won’t eat,” she said, plaintively. “It’s just terrible; we’ve tried everything and he won’t eat.”

Lilly put out her hand toward the small ball of head, but withdrew it.

“Poor little baby!”

“My sister’s gone to the matron to get him some barley water before he gets on the train. There is a grand matron here at the station. I left him with her all morning while we shopped, and he never whimpered. The barley water was her idea. He won’t eat. It’s terrible. He ‘ain’t gained in six weeks. The doctor says we’ve just got to keep trying until we hit a formula that agrees with him.”

“Formula? How funny! Sounds like chemistry.”

The young mother cast a commiserating eye.

“I’d hate to tell you what it sounds like about two P.X. I’ve been on a visit to my mother in Brooklyn, but he yelled so of nights the whole flat was kicking. You ain’t, by any chance, taking the two-five St. Louis Limited, are you? Brazil, Indiana, is mine.”

“I–don’t know–yet.”

“Ever been there?”

“Where?”

“Brazil.”

“I’ve passed through.”

“Some dump, believe me. I keep saying to him, ‘Keep me out here much longer, Fred, and you’ll have to ship me home in a wooden kimono.'”

“Wooden kimono?”

“Coffin. Get me?”

“Then Brazil isn’t your home?”

“By transplanting, yes. I never married out there, believe me. We was both born and raised right here on the little long and narrow island, till he got a better job out there with the telephone company. Believe me, I’ll take my little old fifteen a week in New York to thirty a week out there, bungalow setting thrown in. Bunk-a-low, I call it.”

“But isn’t it better for the baby?”

“That’s right, too. I always say to my twin, I say, ‘Myrt, if you don’t think I got harder hours than when I worked next to you in the Five and Ten, and no pay day, neither, just trade with me one day and take care of the kid and the bunk-a-low.’ I always say to Fred, I say, ‘If you think you’re dog tired, fasten a speedometer on my ankle and read it when you come home nights and see who’s taken the most steps.’ It’s hell, anyways, when they won’t eat and you can’t hit the right formula.”

“Poor baby!”

“You wouldn’t give ’em up after you got ’em, but believe me it’s a wise girl will think twice before she has ’em. A girl gains a lot by marrying–maybe. But believe me, she gives up a lot–sure.”

“But you married the right man.”

“Yeh; but Nature is a trickster. How you going to know where her intentions leave off her and your own begin? Fred and me ran off. Regular love affair. I suppose I am one of them that picked right; right as a girl with my disposition could ever pick. If I hadn’t, believe me, eight hours for me behind the counter in preference to eating the rest of my breakfasts across from the wrong face. Sh-h-h, Freddie baby! Can’t you see my back is breaking? Sh-h-h! Auntie Myrt’s gone to nice matron for barley water. For the love of Mike, sh-h-h! or mamma’ll spank.”

The twin fluttered up then, a vivid italicized prototype, on slim tall heels that clicked and a very small red hat set just at the angle of sauciness. They moved off together after a bickering over luggage, the slim silhouette with the chin sharply flung up and the accentuated sway-back figure of the little mother, her skirt sagging over run-down heels, and, for want of a free hand, blowing up the loose strands of hair from out her eyes.

For a time Lilly sat quite intently, her gaze on a small sign that hung at right angles from an open doorway, “MATRON.” After a while she gathered up her luggage and walked over, entering a little room fitted up with the efficient and institutional unprivacy of public service. On a couch, her face to the wall, a woman in a traveling duster lay stretched, hat and all, in an attitude of exhaustion, a young girl with a wayward fling of posture, sitting sullen in a corner, her very pointed and heeled shoes toeing in. A three-year-old child with a large tag pinned across his little dress played with railroad-owned blocks; the matron, a sort of stout Lachesis, with a string of keys at her belt, gray with years and the rather sweet tiredness of service, sorted towels at a rack. It was to her that Lilly spun out a ready tale, reddening as she talked, but stanch to it.

“I’m from Indianapolis. I want a quiet place for the next few months. Two, to be exact.”

Sweeping her with a look. “Are you in any kind of difficulty?”

“No–not that! I’ve left my husband. We agreed to separate. I want a few weeks of quiet until–afterward, and then I can arrange to start out on my own.”

“You’re too nice a girl to–“

“I’m not asking anything. I am not the kind you are evidently accustomed to deal with here. It is simply that I’m strange.”

“Have you no friends?”

“None with whom I desire to communicate.”

“Well,” doubtfully, “there is the Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls and the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital–“

“Oh,” cried Lilly, with a sting of color to her cheeks, “you don’t understand! I have funds. I tell you it is just that I am strange. I want a medium-priced place to live for the next few weeks, where it won’t be embarrassing.”

The matron unlocked a drawer.

“I have a few addresses here of private rooming houses in the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital and Bellevue districts, if that is what you want. Personally inspected places that can be recommended for their cleanliness and respectability.”

“That is exactly what I need.”

“You will find no questions asked so long as you conduct yourself quietly, and of course you are expected to make your plans for leaving well in advance of any emergency. There are several private sanitariums in the neighborhood.”

“Of course.”

“Here are three addresses. The first is in East Seventeenth Street, just in back of the Hanna Larchmont. It’s a very nice place run by an old Irishwoman who has a lace-curtain establishment in the basement. Here are two others on the same block, in case she has rented her room.”

“I’ll go there at once,” said Lilly, taking the memorandum.

“If I were you I should go back home to friends. It is too bad that a girl like you should find herself in this position. Won’t you let me help you?”

“Thank you”–lifting her bags again–“you have helped me a great deal.”

That night Lilly slept in a small back room, two flights up, over a lace-curtain-cleaning establishment. It was cruder and rougher than anything she had yet encountered; a white-pine table with a washbowl and a toothbrush mug, and a black iron bed that at first glance had sent darting through her a sinking sense of institution. But it was clean, and a sparse Irish landlady with a moist pink presence that steamed hot suds had left her without question and one week’s advance payment tucked into her bosom.

Before going to bed, after she had looked under it and turned out the gas jet, she went over to her single window, opening it wide to the bite of a winter’s night and shooting up the shade. Her view was again of roofs and roofs and chimney pots, dirtier, this time, and dingier, and marching against the sky line, like a dark herd of buffalo, a long range of buildings, blackened of bricks.

It was the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital seen from the rear.

CHAPTER XXIII

When Lilly returned to the Broadway Melody Shop that morning following, there was already a voice driving with such nasal power into the sidewalk din that she hardly needed to enter to learn of her successful replacement.

There was an entirely new hauteur incasing Miss Kirk, who upon her entrance wound into an attitude.

“Well!”

“I was ill.”

“I–see.”

“I guess the place is filled. Oh, it’s all right!”

“Better go over to the office and see Phonzie about it. All I know is they sent over a pair of lungs that can stop traffic when they let out. Forty copies of ‘Cinderella Ella’ just like hot cakes the first time she telephones it out to ’em! Hauls in a netful every time she opens her mouth, and, some mouth! ‘Phonzie,’ I telephones over to him this morning, ‘thank God she’s screened from the public or somebody would buy her for codfish balls.'”

“Do you think there might be something over at the office for me? I’ve had some training for desk work, too.”

“Don’t know. I always told you to put some nose into your voice. Let out, that’s what they want in this business. You never came out enough from behind your tonsils. The refined stuff through a megaphone has about as much chance as a violet in the six-o’clock rush. In other words, dearie,” finished Miss Kirk, her rather close-set eyes focusing upon the tip of Lilly’s nose, “I think you’re fired. Canned, so to speak. Replaced, as it were.”

Lilly laughed, forcing her head high to deny disconcertment.

“Well, anyway, that saves me the trouble of resigning.”

“Yes,” said Miss Kirk, her gaze suddenly long and full of portent, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

To Lilly’s heated consciousness the grilling quality in that gaze was so unmistakable that it plunged into her like an arrow. She walked out, stinging with it.

Hurrying toward the music-publishing office, she caught suddenly her reflection in the plate-glass window of a shop devoted to Broadway’s intense interpretation of the prevalent in modes. She stood, in the very act of motion, regarding this snapshot of herself. Then she entered, emerging presently in a full-length dark-blue cape with gilt buttons and little pipings of red along the edge. It was neither so warm nor so durable as the brown coat, and cost her the rather sickening sensation of breaking into a hundred-dollar bill for twelve dollars and ninety-eight cents.

But it was immensely becoming, this flowing wrap, enveloping her like a wimple, her face rising out of it as clear as a nun’s. Nevertheless, it was her realization of need for it that quite suddenly ended her quest. She turned for home, stopping at the Public Library for one of her frequent perusals of the St. Louis newspapers. She read quickly, her eye skimming the obituary, personal, and social columns. For a week there had daily appeared a little insertion which invariably caused her a twist of heart:

To Sublet: Furnished. Seven rooms and bath. Brand new from top to bottom. Every convenience. Will sell furnishings if desired. Spacious front lawn. Poultry yard. 5199 Page Avenue. Apply 5198 Page Avenue.

Then one day it disappeared and something lifted from Lilly’s heart. This time, as she opened the St. Louis paper of just one week previous, a small oval photograph leaped at her from a row of them, choking her as if it had clutched at her throat.

In a full-page advertisement, Slocum-Hines Hardware Company announced to its many friends a twenty-fifth anniversary, the entire sheet bordered in small oval photographs of the personnel of valued employees.

“Albert Penny, first-assistant buyer.” Regarding it, her consciousness of his promotion was secondary to a feeling that straight lines joining the four corners of Albert’s face would have produced almost a perfect rectangle. A little farther on was Vincent Bankhead, buyer, and on a lower row, Ralph Sluder, with whom she had graduated from grade school.

Strangely enough, in this very edition the name of Horace Lindsley sprang out at her from the tiniest of type in the marriage-license column. Horace Lindsley, 3345 Bell Avenue. Carol Ingomar Devine, 3899 Westminster Place. The name of the bride was associated in Lilly’s mind with the society columns of the Sunday _Post-Dispatch_. A hundred little pointed darts shot through her, and even now the old sinking but delicious sensation of too sudden descent in an elevator.

That night she went to bed with a toothache, a biting little spark of pain that toward morning became a raging flame rushing against the entire inside of her cheek. She could not trace its source, every tooth seeming to stampede.

All of the day following she lay with her face buried into her pillow, abandoning herself utterly to creature discomfort. Toward evening she ventured down as far as Fourteenth Street for a bowl of milk and toast, but the pain raged on, tightening her throat against food, and she crept back to the haven of her cheek to Mrs. McMurtrie’s scorched pillow slip.

After another two nights of local application and the rather futile business of holding warm water in the sag of her cheek, she found out, at the direction of Mrs. McMurtrie, a neighborhood dentist who occupied a suite of rooms over a corner drug store, the large grinning picture of a boy, with a delighted hiatus of missing front tooth, painted on each window and giltly inscribed, “It Didn’t Hurt a Bit.”

It is inconceivable, except that under duress of great pain Lilly could have engaged services so obviously quasi professional, but she was past that perception by now, her nerves from brow to shoulder crackling like a bonfire.

Examination by a dentist with gray pointed side whiskers that flared and brushed her cheek unpleasantly, revealed a pair of abscesses gathering within the gum, and for weeks of mornings she lay back to the agony of steel incisions, for the remainder of the day stretching out on her iron bedstead, face to wall.

Then for a few days a premature spring came out teasingly. The East Seventeenth Street block, with its rows of houses, going down none too debonairly, from gentility to senility, showing a bud here and there. There even remained one private residence with a polished door bell and name plate and a little cluster of crocuses in an iron jardinière set out in a front yard about the dimension of an army blanket.

Crocuses, whose cold, moist smell, with all the pungency of associations an odor can arouse, somehow suggested, to Lilly, Taylor Avenue and little Harry Calvert. She did not remember it, but Harry had once stolen two satiny red ones for her from a Taylor Avenue flower bed and been soundly cuffed by a housewife.

A block away, Gramercy Park, a rectangle of the Knickerbocker New York of the woodcut, red-brick sidewalk, salon parlor, and crystal chandelier, was already lacy with the first leafwork of spring. Several times, when the sun lay warmest, Lilly ventured into its Old World sobriety, strolling around the tall grill fence that inclosed the park. It was locked against the public, nursemaids from surrounding homes and a few old ladies stiff with gentility holding keys. Children from the raggedy fringe of Third Avenue played without awareness, against the outside of the iron palings, too young, and, anyway, too imprisoned in class, to resent one more monopoly even of God’s sunshine and the brown, warm earth already swollen with life about to be.

It seemed to Lilly that almost any of these mild days Washington Irving, in pot hat and lace in his sleeves, might come strolling this pompous Square. She bought a manhandled copy of Volume I of Knickerbocker’s _History of New York_ off a secondhand bookstall one day, and read it sitting on the sun-drenched stoop of one of the old houses whose eyeless stare and boarded windows bespoke one absent family. Off this same stall she also purchased a volume of Wordsworth’s poems, feeling a vague, a procreative, and who shall say mistaken need for beauty. Over and over she read, milking each phrase dry:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath elsewhere had its setting and cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness But trailing clouds of glory, do we come from God who is our home.

She read of daffodils as if she would steep her soul in the sun of their yellowness, bought some one morning and propped them in the toothbrush mug.

She practiced her shorthand, too, these days, in a blank book bought for the purpose, sometimes an hour–even two or three–until the sun receded off the stoop.

Then for a week it rained, and from the patch of back yard, two stories beneath her window, began to mount the moist smell of living earth. Beside this open window, after the harrowing mornings of dentistry, with a soft rain falling from a sky swift and low with clouds, she wrote, her pencil dabbing constantly at the well of her tongue, a short story of some six thousand words composed out of the fabric of an idea that suddenly presented itself. She copied it in her most painstaking handwriting, on one side of foolscap, and sent it, with return postage, to a popular magazine.

She was venturing out less and less, preparing over a portable oil stove her own breakfast, and very often her own lunch and dinner. She tried to sew, too, cutting up one of the sheerest and prettiest of her nightgowns into a litter of small garments, but almost immediately her hands would fall idle and the great waves of terror begin to surge.

Certain inevitable decisions crept closer. She decided against the Hanna Larchmont Hospital, its very foyer awakening in her such a sickening sense of public institution that she ventured no farther, but engaged a tiny room in a private sanitarium in Nineteenth Street, at twenty dollars a week, and the privilege of boarding on two or three weeks after her discharge.

Her bag of three new one-hundred-dollar bills still hung in all its reassuring entirety from the little pink ribbon about her neck, but the confronting dentist’s bill of twenty-five dollars, and the slow but acid process of daily expenditure eating into the thirty or forty dollars left in her purse, lay uncomfortably against her consciousness.

By a series of constantly repeated calculations, particularly if the short story should bring in even a check large enough to cover the dentistry, Lilly planned to span the weeks of her narrowing interval with the three bills intact, but pretty shortly the first piece of mail she had received in New York arrived in a long, bulky envelope:

MY DEAR MISS PARLOW,–Thank you for submitting the accompanying manuscript. It does not quite get across in this office, but it is near enough to our standard for us to want to see anything more you may care to submit.–THE EDITOR.

That night Lilly cried again all through her sleep, presenting herself next morning at the dentist’s with heavy, rimmed eyes. It was her final visit, and before mounting the chair she laid down her carefully counted-out payment, five five-dollar bills, in a little pile on the revolving stand.

Doctor Hotchkiss, with the offshoot of white whiskers from each jowl, and who was fond of pinching her cheek as she lay under his touch, moistened his fingers and counted.

“The charges are fifty dollars,” he said.

She was immediately startled.

“Why, Doctor Hotchkiss, you said twenty-five!”

“Fifty, with the bridgework, my dear young woman,” he said, the words swimming in the oil of his suavity.

“You said twenty-five.”

“You misunderstood, my dear young woman. Twenty-five would not pay for the amount of gold I used. Fifty is what I said. Fifty dollars,” his voice rising.

She looked her despair.

“I–It’s not honorable. I asked you distinctly. What if I haven’t it to spare–“

“That is not my business,” he replied, his entire manner roughening up. “You have forty dollars’ worth of my gold in your mouth and the law provides for receiving goods you can’t pay for. You’ve got it, all right, and if you haven’t, from the look of you, there is some one behind you who has.”

She colored so furiously that her eyes smarted to tears as she reached down into her blouse for the little chamois bag.

“Give me fifty dollars,” she said, cramming the five five-dollar bills back into her purse, holding a crisp new hundred-dollar bill out to him, her voice as fluttering as a broken wing; “but nothing–nothing will ever convince me that you have not taken advantage of me.”

He counted her fifty dollars off his own roll, all the more suave.

“You will find you have made a mistake, my dear young woman. This is a strictly one-price office. Now I will take out that temporary filling and finish you up.”

She was loath to mount the chair, except that the nerve was jumping again. For half an hour she lay under his touch; finally, as he fumbled to untie the bib-like towel about her neck, his lips descended so close to her cheek that she could feel their cold, liver-colored caress touch her finally in a kiss. She sprang to her feet, jerking the towel away from her neck and rubbing it across the defiled spot.

“How dare you! You cheat! You miserable creature! How dare you! You come near me and I’ll call the police. Let me out of here! Out!”

She ran from the place with her hat in her hand, across the street, and up two flights to her room. Panting and drenched with perspiration, all day she lay on the little iron bed, her face to the wall, shuddering.

“O God, where are you driving me? What are you driving me on for? Where? Why? What does it mean?”

At dusk, with a sense of weakness entirely new to her, she rose to undress, resting after each discarded piece of clothing.

She could hear Mrs. McMurtrie passing through the outer hall, a tin bucket, on one of its frequent errands to Joe’s place across the street, grating against the wall. The room took on a deeper and soupy color of twilight, the great pachyderm of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital casting its shadow.

Suddenly, one of those boltlike perceptions that can spring out apparently from space, Lilly clapped her hands to her throat, her breast, the back of her neck. Her bag, the little chamois bag, and the pink ribbon at her neck were gone! She shook through her clothing in a frenzy of haste; she tore each piece inside out; slapped her hands over the washstand; flung back her mattress, plunging her fingers into every imaginable crevice. Dragged out the bed; jerked up the tacks from the carpet, turning back the corners; felt along the dark, narrow halls and down two flights on her hands and knees; shook out her clothing again. The hair came down over her shoulders and her reasoning seemed to go.

That hand fumbling to untie that bib-towel. Those pointed whiskers approaching her cheek. The little pink bow at her neck. Those liverlike lips. That soft, boneless hand at the back of her neck had jerked out the bag! O God! that soft, slimy kiss and the little jerk of the bow at the back of her neck! and fell down with a screaming that brought Mrs. McMurtrie.

At noon of the next day Lilly Penny lay in the public ward of the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital, a premature mother by some weeks.

Lilly Penny, whose trousseau had included twelve of the sheerest batiste ones, in a coarse, unbleached nightdress not her own and the least gentle to her flesh she had ever known.

There was a row of her of which she was the whitest; wan women, big-eyed with pain, who had gone down into the canons of death that there might be life.

She had a slow, vagarious notion that all of the cots were tilted, so that they appeared each on a cross, these mothers. It was sad to lie there in that etheric world, yet somehow pleasant. The frieze on the auditorium of the St. Louis Center High School was unaccountably before her. It was still sown with lilies, but with babies’ heads for calyxes. Her mother, her teeth set with effort, was scrubbing something. A window sill? Who was calling? Mamma–Flora. You wouldn’t give ’em up after you got ’em, but: it’s a wise girl that’ll think twice. She felt so white. Never, in fact, had she enjoyed such a sense of her whiteness. She held up her arm to regard the column of it, and wanted to laugh, but it was easier to cry.

They brought her child. Hers, Lilly Becker Penny’s. A huge tray of them, like a vender’s street-corner offering of spring flowers. Tiny human blooms with a tag at each wrist. Incredible!

“Three guesses,” said the nurse, through a smile, and held out the human bouquet toward her. She could scarcely breathe. She wanted to scream, to draw up the sheet over her head. To suffocate. Herself, external to herself, was breathing out there–off somewhere in that tray. She tried to pull up the covers over her head. A hand would draw them away. There was a black one in that row of little pink nubs of humanity! Heads like hard-boiled eggs not quite cooked through. No! No! No!

Suddenly Lilly raised to her elbow. The second from the end! The big head. The full-blown spring-tight curls! The color of honey. The blue eyes that were almost ready to turn gray. The tag on the wrist. Number two. The tag of her own unbleached gown? Number two!

“Give me!” cried Lilly, on a sudden mounting note that left a little resonance like a plucked violin string.

“Right the first time,” cried the nurse, lifting the second from the end, “and a little beauty she is.”

That little living ball of head in the crotch of her arm! She leaned forward to the flameless heat of it, her lips moving and wanting to speak.

“What is it, dear?” asked the nurse.

She moved them again, but still silently.

The nurse bent lower, her ear to the pillow.

“Now what is it, dear? Say it again.”

This time through the veil of a whisper she could hear quite clearly:

“Zoe.”

Book Two

THE GRAPE

CHAPTER I

There were vagrant little streams of water, released by thaw, hurrying along against the curbs of Second Avenue, the absolutely impeccable spring day that Lilly Penny walked out of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital into the warm scented bath of its sunshine, a blanketed bundle in the crook of her arm that mysteriously seemed to animate the nap of the wool, lifting it and suggesting the little life it enfolded.

She felt strangely light and giddy that life could have gone clattering on outside those dim weeks of hers inside the walls.

She had gone down in a dark, a fantastic hiatus in her scheme of things, and it was incredible that out here were street cars still clanging for right of way, pedestrians weaving in and out the great tapestry of a city day, factory whistles splitting asunder with terrific cleavage the fore–from the afternoon. There was a hurdy-gurdy rattling tinnily through the morning that must have played on uninterruptedly through this strange demise of hers.

School children, the air raucous with them, sped home for luncheon through streets that already smelled of sun on asphalt. She had never really noticed them before. That little fat girl with the braids. How pretty to loop them up that way behind each ear with bright red bows. She pressed against the little warm life at her bosom. She felt throaty with laughter, and the tears of a delicious weakness that made her ache to lie down somewhere in this sun, close to the soft bearing earth whose secret she knew now, and open this bundle. Hers! It was the first moment of her actual ownership. Reality was reclaiming her from that unreal realm of doctors and nurses and the dozy detached period of her convalescence.

She wanted to run with her living loot to some quiet corner and open it up. There was a little square of park with a municipal-laid-out bed of tulips across the street, but its benches were crowded with humanity, like sparrows sunning themselves on a wire, and the winding of its asphalt paths swift with the hurry of all the strangely uninterrupted world outside.

She hurried toward Seventeenth Street–could have run, in fact, such a resurgence of the old vitality was upon her. Before one of the private houses a rheumatic-looking oleander was in the supremest moment of its full bloom. It lit up the old street as if a bride had donned her veil there. Outside the cleaning establishment were two stretchers of lace curtains sunning themselves against the wall.

Lilly hurried up the stoop and pulled out the bell that rang dimly in one of those subterranean retreats peculiar to landladies.

Mrs. McMurtrie herself opened the door, as usual her great hands steaming and swollen with suds.

“Well?” she said, her arm immediately flung up to the virago’s akimbo and her foot sliding in between the door.

In an agony of anxiety over possible exclusion, Lilly’s words came so fast they hardly allowed for the coherence of spacing.

“How do you do, Mrs. McMurtrie? I’ve returned and I’m fine. I’m so sorry about that–that night and the trouble I must have caused you. Thank you for sending my bag after me. It’s a girl. She’s the best little thing, Mrs. McMurtrie. Doesn’t cry at all. I’ll only be wanting her with me for a few days until I can get her placed somewhere near me, so I can spend evenings and Sundays with her. I’ve such plans! I’m ready to take a position again and forge right ahead. If I might have the old room, Mrs. McMurtrie, I promise you that you won’t know she’s in the house these few days. It won’t mean one thing in the way of extras for you, but I’m willing to pay more. Nothing except a little alcohol stove, and if your little girl could watch her for an hour or two once in a while, when I’m out, I’ll pay her, too. Gladly. My bag is at the hospital. I’ll send for it–“

“Be saving your breath,” cried Mrs. McMurtrie, flinging her gesture upward with a cluck of the fingers. “I wouldn’t give that for your yarn! You’re a hussy, from the looks of the whole business, and I’ve a mind to be suing the railroad station for the sending of you to me. You mentioned the husband of your own free will. Your husband! Faith, and not so much as a relation turning up to be with you in your trouble. Husband! You’d better be going and telling that to the Home for Indigent Girls. Your husband! Bah!”

To a door slammed full in her face Lilly stood there for a stunned instant, hugging at her bundle. She would have liked to crumple up, to have felt the earth open and drag her down to a merciful oblivion, but after a while she turned and walked down those steps, fumbling with her free hand for an address she had applied for at the hospital information desk, against possible emergency.

The slip of paper read Nineteenth Street, almost in a straight line from where she stood. It was a morose, lean building, only two windows wide and five stories high, with a porcelain sign above the bell, “ROOMS.” A wrinkled pod of a woman opened the door.

“I’m looking for a room for myself alone except for a few days until I get my baby placed–“

“Nothing,” answered on the click of a closed door.

With her lips almost ludicrously lifted to stimulate the crescent of a smile, Lilly descended. There were passers-by and one or two of them turned for another glance, and more than ever she kept the smile looped up.

Then she instituted a campaign down one side and up the other of two blocks of Nineteenth Street. Finally there came a whimper from the depths of the blanket, and a light and coughy little cry against and into her heart.

She stood on the corner, arguing with herself for a clear brain, the easy fatigue of weakness beginning to descend and a queer unsteadiness of limb setting in.

“Don’t lose your head, Lilly,” she admonished of self. “There is a way, only you haven’t yet struck it. Don’t let your brain feel trapped. Keep cool. Quiet. Dove. Peace. Cathedral. Sweet and low. Sweet and low. Neugass. No. Gertrude Kirk. No, no! If only Mrs. McMurtrie–Indigent Girls–No–no–no!”

However, after a while she did turn back through toward Second Avenue, her feet quickened with a destination she could not bring herself to admit, and so she loitered, inquiring at three more front doors which had now come to have an angry scowl for her as she mounted their front steps.

Between a Home for Lithuanian Aged and a Swedish bakery and lunch room that she had more than once frequented, a black-and-gold sign spanned what at one time had been the noncommittal front of a stately residence–“Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls.”

Ascending these steps, she could feel the glance of every passer-by boring into the very back of her head, awls crawling through and through her. She tried to drag her hat down over her eyes. Her black velvet sailor, modish enough when new, had suffered somewhat in the hurried packing off of her things after her. The buckram rim, misshapen from too close quarters, flared rather outlandishly off her face, so that after she had pulled the bell she stood with her back to the sidewalk, while the sign above seared into her.

Induced by the warmth of the day and the bundle of blanket she carried, a pox of perspiration had burst out on her face, but the little whimperings against her heart had died down so that she dared not risk the jolt of reaching for her handkerchief.

She was admitted finally into one of the large salon parlors that had lost its beauty as a woman can lose hers. Stripped of the jewels of crystal chandeliers, long mirrors, and glittering floors, it remained now a gaunt strip of room, divided by a low fence and swinging gate into office and waiting room.

There were long windows that looked out upon the polyglot of Second Avenue, which even then, over a not quite abandoned elegance, was donning its Joseph’s coat of seventeen nationalities and dining, bartering, and gesticulating in as many languages.

On a strip of bench between the windows Lilly sat and waited.

The movement of the room coagulated about the figure of a woman seated at a desk on the office side of the partition. Girls, to Lilly it seemed a whole phantasmagoria of identical ones with short hair and eyes none too young, passed in and out of the little swinging gate. Suddenly it struck her, with such a wrench that she almost cried out, that here was no illusion. They were uniformed, these girls. In dark-blue cotton stuff, with three rows of white tape running around the skirt hem and white bone buttons up the back. Through the doorway one of them was washing down a flight of stairs, raising a cold, soap-and-lye smell. Another, with a splay smile that was terrible as a wound, wiped in and out among the spokes of the banisters, her face as without muscle as a squeezed orange, and smiling without knowing that it smiled.

Sitting there with her bundle closer and closer to her heart, Lilly closed her eyes to that smile.

Above all, she knew that she needed to keep clear, and yet across the swept horizon she tried to create, silhouettes of thought such as these would move, fantastic as cloud shapes.

“Who am I?” And then, with her old untrained probing after reality: “How do I know I am not dreaming? Where am I going? What is it I want? How terrible! Me, Lilly Becker. This place is like the poorhouse at home, that time the High School sociology class visited it. Zoe, are you real? Mine alone! Not his. Mine. You must be the miracle and show me the way, Zoe. You shall be me plus everything that I am not. To have missed the ecstasy of you is not to have lived. If Auchinloss could hear me now. Who knows? I may, yet. What if I am like Joan of Arc, heeding a vision, only I don’t know which way the vision is pointing. Funny. Oh, but I’m going to clear the way for you, Zoe. No Chinese shoes for your little feet or your little brain. Free–to choose–to be! That’s the way I’ll rear my daughter. My daughter! Queer I never think of him, her father. Zoe–what if you don’t want to be saved from what I’m saving you. The fatness–the sedentary spirit of–out there. But you are me plus everything that I am not. You will want to be saved. You will.”

It was out of this limbo that Lilly was finally summoned, through the little swing door to an empty chair beside the desk.

She thought she had never beheld such eyes as were turned upon her through polished eyeglasses with the complement of a wide black-ribbon guard. They were the color of slate and cleaned for impression. The eight cases that had preceded Lilly were gone from them just as the eight cases to follow would erase one by one.

“Sit down,” she said. Then, “Girl or boy?”

“Girl.”

“Name?”

“Zoe. Oh, you mean my name? Let me explain. You must understand that I am not–indigent. I am looking for a room. I’ve just come out of the hospital with my little one, and you have no idea how difficult it is to find lodging where there is a child.”

“What is your name?”

“I–I must beg of you not to–to take an attitude toward–“

“If you want me to help you, my dear, you must trust me. What is your name?”

“Lilly. Your files won’t help you. I’m not on record–that way. Lilly Parlow for professional reasons, but I want her christened by her full family name–“

“What is your family name?”

“Why, Lilly–Becker–Penny.”

“Your last address?”

“You mean?”

“Where did you sleep last night?”

“I told you. Hanna Larchmont Hospital. I received my discharge to-day.”

“Is the father of your child your lawful husband?”

“Indeed, yes!”

“Where is he?”

“Out West–where I came from.”

“Exactly where?”

“D-d-denver, I think.”

“Why are you here and he there?”

“Oh, you mustn’t question me like this! I left him of my own free will, after I found I had made a mistake. I am not asking anything of you. I can pay. I want a room for me and my baby, for a few days until I get her placed. I can make certain arrangements for her and take up my work again.”

“What is your work?”

“I am a singer.”

“Where are your friends?”

“I have none.”

“You are quite sure that this man whom you call your husband–“

“I won’t be talked to in that tone.”

“Of course, you realize that you are a highly specialized case.”

“Do these institutions merely function as machines? Is no provision made for the exception? Rent me a room for me and my baby. I will pay you in advance. See, I have five five-dollar bills in my purse. I must have a place to sleep and I won’t leave here unless you forcibly eject me. I must have my luggage; it is still at the hospital.”

“How is it they did not help you there to make further provision for–“

“I didn’t explain. It seemed inconceivable that I could not find immediately lodgings.”

“I see,” said Lilly’s interrogator, with the air of seeing not at all. “Your case does not come under our kind of jurisdiction. Our girls are unfortunate mothers who are cared for here until such time as arrangements can be made to place the child. But no girl is entitled to our nursery and infirmary service for more than four consecutive weeks, and then, as I said, only in the event of unfortunate motherhood.”

“Can only the unmarried mother be unfortunate?”

“I hardly care to discuss with you the wisdom of our policies.”

“But you must,” cried Lilly, now thoroughly beside herself. “What about the girl who would rather fight out her own destiny than live through the miserable and immoral–yes, immoral–process of a marriage that she realizes has been a mistake? Is there no provision for the woman who hasn’t a man-made grievance against society? Who simply wants her one-hundred-per-cent-right to live? Women are coming to demand it more and more, that right! I venture to say that ten years from now they will be voting themselves that right. Now we’re like a lot of half-hatched chickens pecking through the shell. I’ve pecked through! My daughter may live to see them all pecked through.”

“Really, I can’t see–“

“To-day a woman on her own with a child has only one meaning. I’ve been treated like a leper. Suppose, for argument, my child hadn’t had a legitimate father. All the more reason a hand should have been held out to us. But I’m not asking anything. A night’s lodging, madam, for which I can pay. Here it is in advance. I’m not going to leave!”

The child was whimpering now lustily and wanting to lift its little body from the long confinement of wrappings. There were tears and anger and a brilliant sort of challenge in Lilly’s voice and in her glance that seemed to dart and glance off the starchy shirt waist of the figure behind the desk. She sat clicking her pencil against her teeth, eyes averted, as if to galvanize herself against a personality that dared to intrude itself through a “case.”

She openly regarded her work, this Miss Letitia Scullen, who was one day to lay down her life valiantly enough at the altar of typhus in war-stricken Rumania, as an exact science. Indigency, like typhus, was a pandemic which must ultimately respond to an antitoxin. It was as if her forty-seven charges were sick, and she reading the blood test of indigency, prescribing in toto.

“If you are what you say you are, then you are not entitled to the benefits of this home. Our girls here receive absolutely collective treatment along lines worked out for their general needs. Your case is an isolated one. You are not in need.”

“But please, please, please, is there no need except that covered by vice? Can you not conceive of a plight being all the worse because there is no provision for it?”

“It is unthinkable that a woman like you, of evident refinement and education, should find herself in the predicament you describe.”

“Then thank God for being a rebel, if it will make you ponder on what is new, untried, and not according to formula. There are only two kinds of women you social workers recognize. The sheltered ones and the unfortunates. What about the woman who is neither, but merely out on her own? I try to meet life as an individual and not as a woman. What happens? Doors slam in my face. I can’t buy a night’s lodging for the child in my arms. It sounds like a thirty-cent melodrama. And now you, whose life study is life–I tell you I won’t be turned off. You must take me in.”

“It’s very irregular.”

“I’ll pay.”

“We don’t accept paying inmates. You may make the institution a present if you so desire. I’ll put you up in the infirmary–it happens to be empty; and you may have the use of the nursery equipment adjoining, and there is a practical nurse in the house. Understand that this is entirely outside the regulations of the institution and I must ask you to make different arrangements as soon as possible.”

“Thank you,” said Lilly, ashamed to be grateful and the tears pressing against her eyeballs. “Oh, my dear, thank you! Thank you!”

And so it came about that in a room of five white cots and three barred windows, with the aid of a practical nurse and a tiny gas stove on a tin mat, Lilly prepared her daughter for the night.

In her bag, lugged over from the hospital by one of the uniformed girls, was the little layout, parting gift of the institution, including a machine-stitched flannelet nightdress that Lilly could have wept over as she fastened the thick button at the throat.

Still, with the chapped-faced nurse moving about the bare, ugly room on her everlasting mission of efficiency, diluting the formula to just the proportion required, rubbing the little bud of a body with coarse cornstarch, the sense of ownership did not descend upon Lilly.

She wanted to feel this new estate of hers. In all the three and a half weeks there had never been a moment of privacy, to give reality to this pink-and-blue-and-yellow bloom that had somehow flowered from the tree of her being.

She wanted the quiet to reconcile this new, this terrible, this throat-throbbing sweetness with the Medean fury which had flung her, a shuddering, choking mass upon that rooming-house floor. She wanted to feel again and again the quick, ecstatic brash that could race in a wave over her when she held this warm rose of life to her breast.

At just before nine there was a wordless round of inspection from the white starched shirt waist surmounted with the spectacles and the black-ribbon guard, a final look-in from the nurse whose face was Swedishly blond and pink from chapping, a bottle of milk placed in the small refrigerator, and the little bundle on the pillow covered with an extra thickness of murky blanket.

At nine o’clock the lights went out just as Lilly had slid into her own gown. She tiptoed to the door, barefooted, locking it and thereby violating a rule of the institution. There must have been a moon somewhere behind housetops, because through the three shadeless windows a sort of gleam whitely powdered the silence.

She was suddenly full of fear there in the darkness and the aloneness, and ran over to the cot for the miracle of that soft body to her flesh. She lifted it from the nest of coarse pillow, even in sleep the tendril of a little finger closing about hers.

There were crisscross shadows on the floor, cast there by the iron bars at the windows. Her child lay asleep in an institutional garb of charity. The father of that child, ignorant of its very existence, was at that moment, and at a distance of one thousand miles, adjusting a new rubber stopper to the bathtub in the home he shared with his parents-in-law.

On one of the empty cots the rather silly silhouette of Lilly’s hat, its buckram rim sadly broken, persisted through the gloom. Her shoes, in a little attitude of waiting beside a chair, lopped slightly of a tipsiness induced by run-over heels. In the jumble of changing hands the black valise of her underwear, handkerchiefs, and baby garments had disappeared, so her little washed-out chemise, quite dainty, hung drying over a table edge.

Outside the Home for Indigent Girls a city that took absolutely no reckoning of Lilly wove its pattern toward another to-morrow.

She was alone with the first realization of her child, in a moment that might have shaped itself to crush her. She felt a throbbing that seemed to make a rush for her throat. She sat down on the bed, leaning over until her body formed a sort of cave about the child. She had a sense of the power to strangle both their lives out there in that strange darkness. An old fear leaned out at her.

“Am I mad?”

More and more the sense of wanting to strangle flowed over her.

“Here–to-night–now!”

A cry leaped up under her pressure, startled, and with a stab of pain in it.

She swooped the little squirming burden up under her chin; she buried her head into the warm froth of curls, the light wind of her laughter suddenly sweeping the room.

“Mother’s darling! Twiddle-de-darling. Moonlit flake! Beautifulest. Zoeist flower in the world. Mine alone! Alone mine! Oodle-de-dums. To-morrow! To-morrow!”

* * * * *

There followed for Lilly a week of scars, each exactly as deep as the day was long.

First, the heartbreaking business of giving over her child to the chappy-faced nurse and a rear room of nursery hung in the odors of formaldehyde and lined up into a ward of white iron cribs, each screened in with a clothes horse of little flannel garments of a thickness that wrung Lilly’s heart.

There were now two additional occupants–a poor, top-heavy infant with a fourteen-year-old mother, father unknown, and the teething baby of one of the blue-uniformed inmates whose routine allowed her periods of the