"Only love--some sort of magic potion which Nature uses to drug us, can make her methods seem anything but gross--horrible."

"What's on your mind, Lilly? We don't need to be bashful together any more. We're married women."

Lilly rose then, moving toward the dresser, drawing the large tortoise-sh.e.l.l pins from the smooth coil of her hair.

"If you want me to go to the meat market with you, mamma, I'd better be dressing before it gets any hotter."

"You're too warm, Lilly. I'll go myself. You can learn the beef cuts later."

"I would rather stay at home and practice awhile. I haven't touched the piano since--"

"Tack up your shelf paper while I'm gone, Lilly--your cupboards look so bare--and then come over to lunch with me and we'll go to the euchre together. It's your first afternoon at the Junior Matrons and I want you to look your best. Wear your flowered dimity."

"If you don't mind, mamma, I want to unpack my music this afternoon and get my books straightened. I'd rather not go."

"The nerve! And that poor little Mrs. Wempner goes to extra trouble in your honor. I hear she's to have pennies attached to the tally cards.

Pretty idea, pennies for Penny. Well, I'm not going to worry my life away! Work it out your own way. I'll send you home a steak and some quinine from the drug store for Albert to take to-night."

Presently Lilly heard the lower door slam. It came down across her nerves like the descent of a cleaver.

For another hour she sat immovable. A light storm had come up with summer caprice, thunder without lightning, and a thin fall of rain that hardly laid the dust. There was a certain whiteness to the gloom, indicating the sun's readiness to pierce it, but a breeze had sprung up, fanning the Swiss curtains in against Lilly's cheek, and across the street she could see her mother's shades fly up and windows open to the refreshment of it.

At twelve o'clock the telephone rang. It was her husband. "Yes, she was well. Pouring downtown? Funny. Only a light shower out there. No, the man had not brought the missing caster for the bedstead. Yes, six-forty-six, and she would put the steak on at six-twenty. Yes, the poultry netting had come. Fine. Bathtub stopper. Yes."

For quite a while after this she sat in the hallway, her hand on the instrument, in the att.i.tude of hanging up the receiver.

She did piddle among her books then, a vagabond little collection of them. Textbooks, in many cases her initials and graduating year printed in lead pencil along the edges. Rolfe's complete edition of Shakespeare.

A large ill.u.s.trated edition of Omar Khayyam. Several gift volumes of English poets. Complete set of small red Poes that had come free with a two-year magazine subscription. Graduation gift of Emerson's essays.

_Vision of Sir Launfal_. _Journeys to the Homes of Great Men_.

_Lucille_, in padded leather. An unaccountably present _Life of Cardinal Newman_. _The Sweet Girl Graduate_. _Faust_. _How to Interpret Dreams_.

They occupied three shelves of the little case; the remaining two she filled in with stacks of sheet music, laying aside ten picked selections marked "Repertoire" and occasionally sitting back on her heels to hum through the pages of a score. Once she carried a composition to the piano, "Who is Sylvia?" to be exact, singing it through to her own accompaniment. Her voice lifted nicely against the little square confines of reception hall, Lena, absolutely wringing wet with suds and perspiration, poking her head up from the laundry stairs.

"Oh, Miss Lilly, that's grand! Please sing it over again."

She did, quickened in spite of herself. Her voice had a pleasant plangency, a quality of more yet to come and as if the wells of her vitality were far from drained.

She could hear from the laundry the resumed thrubbing and even smell the hot suds. The afternoon reeked of Monday. She left off, finally, and rocked for a time on the cool porch, watching the long, silent needles of rain, wisps of thought floating like feathers.

"Who am I? Lilly Becker. How do I happen to be me? What if I were Melba instead? What if Melba were frying the sirloin to-night and five thousand people were coming to hear me sing in the Metropolitan Opera House? Albert--husband. What a queer word! Husband. Love. Hate.

Lindsley. Language. How did language ever come to be? We feel, and then we try to make sounds to convey that feeling. What language could ever convey the boiling inside of me? I must be a sea, full of terrible deep-down currents and smooth on top. How does one know whether or not he is crazy--mad? How do I know that I am not really singing to five thousand? Maybe this is the dream. Page Avenue. Lena in the laundry.

That sirloin steak being delivered around the side entrance, by a boy with a gunny sack for an ap.r.o.n. Dreams. Freud. Suppressed desires.

That's me. Thousands--thousands of them. Am I my conscious or my unconscious self? Can I break through this--this dream into reality?

Which part of me is here on this front porch and which part is Marguerite with the pearls in her hair? Bed casters, they're real. And Albert--husband--the rows of days--and nights--nights of my marriage. O G.o.d, make it a dream! Make it a dream!"

At six-forty-six Albert Penny came home to supper.

CHAPTER XIII

There was nothing consciously premeditated about the astonishing speech Lilly made to her husband that evening. Yet it was as if the words had been in burning rehearsal, so scuttling hot they came off her lips.

There had been a coolly quiet evening on the front porch, a telephone from Flora Bankhead, a little run-in visit from her parents, and now at ten o'clock her husband, shirt-sleeved and before the mirror, tugging to unb.u.t.ton his collar.

She did not want that collar off. It brought, rawly, a sense of his possession of her. She sat fully dressed, in her chair beside the window, the black irises almost crowding out the gray in her eyes, her hands tightening and tightening against that removal of collar. Finally one half of it flew open, and on that tremendous trifle Lilly spoke.

"Albert."

"Yes?"

"Let me go!"

"Huh?"

"It's wrong. I've made a mistake. I don't want to be married."

For a full second he held that pose at his collar b.u.t.ton, his entire being seeming to suspend a beat.

"What say?" not exactly doubting, but wanting to corroborate his senses.

She was amazed at her ability to reply.

"I said I have made a terrible mistake. I can't stand being married to you."

He came toward her with the open side of his collar jerking like an old door on its hinges.

"Now lookahere," he said, rather roughly for him; "it's all right for a woman to have her whims once in a while, but there are limits. I've been as considerate with you as I know how to be. A darn sight more than many a man with his woman."

"I'm not that!" she cried, springing to her feet.

"What?"

"That! Your--that!"

"Call it what you want," he said, "all I know is that you're my wife and I married you to settle down to a decent, self-respecting home life and that a sensible woman leaves her whims behind her."

She stood with her hands to the beat of her throat, looking at him as if he had hunted her into her corner, which he had not.

"Let me go," she said.

He seemed trying to gain control of his large, loose hands, clenching and unclenching them.

"Good G.o.d!" he said. "What say?"

"It's no use! I've tried. I'm wrong. Something in me is stronger than you or mamma or papa or--or environment. All my life I've been fighting against just--just--this. And now I've let it trap me."

"Darn funny time to be finding it out."