"Lilly--Lilly--a father ignorant of his child!"

"They'd suck us back, I tell you! Self-preservation even against family is a first law of life! Owls eat their young! So can human beings feed on the thing they love. It's not these first years would matter. But ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. They would hitch her vision, not to a star, but to a--a tin dipper. You don't understand. You know it seems to me, Mrs. Blair, that most people, women, anyhow, are like great big houses with only half the rooms in use. The mentality closed up and musty from disuse because they have never found or made the keys. I want my child to live roundly--in all her mental rooms. What is the use closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I want her to know the world she lives in from attic to cellar. The good from the bad, so that, knowing the bad, she can love more the good. The right to live!"

"You're for woman's rights. You're one of those suffragists."

"I guess I am if woman's rights mean more breadth, more beauty, more realization of our latent selves. Oh, I don't know what I mean. That's been my curse."

In the darkness Mrs. Blair put up a hand to the sheen of Lilly's flowing hair.

"You poor child! You funny girl. You need--"

"What?"

"The right man to sweep you off your feet."

"I knew you were going to say that. No, you're wrong. I'm not essentially a man's woman, Mrs. Blair. s.e.x isn't even as big a part of my life as it is of most women's. I can't flirt. I haven't an ounce of coquetry in me. I think I almost hate--"

"You mean you hate what your experience has been. The right man for you, dear, a man with enough of the materialist to hold you in check and enough of youth and vision and ideals to soar with you. No, no, you don't hate him, Lilly."

"Why--why--who?"

"Oh, I've seen it flash between the two of you. I've watched it being silently born. Lilly child, look at me!"

"Why, Mrs. Blair! Why--Mrs. Blair! I've never seen him outside of office hours in my life. I never laid eyes on him until he walked in that night from Chicago. Why, I--I'm a married woman! He's younger--than I--a year!

He knows there is Zoe. He sent her up a little hobbyhorse from the property room. Why, Mrs. Blair--of course if you look at me like--that--"

She was suddenly in the older woman's arms, a pa.s.sionate, a peony red flooding her face and waving down her words. She was all for further resistance, but her denial had taken on an archness for which she somehow blushed.

Besides, it was suddenly delicious to huddle there, tingling in the darkness.

CHAPTER VI

There were a quality of voice, of eye, and a fine, upstanding rush of sooty black hair which he tried to j.a.pan down with a pair of swift military brushes, in the way of woman's safest judgment of Bruce Visigoth.

By the quieter kinetics of his own s.e.x, he was a man's man. He commingled easily in his clubs, a university, a Mask and Wig, a Long Island Canoe, and the Gramercy. Preceding his brother in this last and later proposing him.

The resemblance between the two was neither of form nor of feature.

Rather, it was fleeting as a wing; in fact, was just that. There was something in the batting of the eye, a slant of lid, that showed the mysterious corpuscles of the same blood a.s.serting themselves. Yet it was more the likeness of father and son; the older man shorter, wider of thigh, and with none of that fleet, rather sensitive lift of head, partly because his neck was shorter and not upflung as if so sensitive to the very rush of air that the f.l.a.n.g.es of the nostrils quivered.

There was a more nervous organization to Bruce that gave him something of the startled look of wild horse, particularly with the laid-back Mercury wing effect to his hair.

In anger Robert had a repertoire of oaths that stained the air like the trail of a wounded shark, his pupils receding to points and his mouth pulling to an oblique.

Bruce, if anything, whitened and quieted. He had once, with hardly more than a lightning lunge, broken a truck driver's wrist in an office altercation over some manhandled scenery, and gone home rather sick because the fellow's opened cheek had bled down over his desk.

His office manner was clipped, brisk, and highly impersonal. He cultivated a little mustache to enhance that manner, yet the two sixteen-year-old girls who pasted clippings into sc.r.a.p books spitted their curls for him, and, since his advent, even Ida Blair had discarded her eye shade.

In moments of high pressure he stuttered slightly, grinding and whirring over a sibilant like a stalled tire. Upon one occasion that was to be memorable Lilly sat between the brothers, notebook in lap, her head bent to dodge the fusillade of high words pa.s.sing over it.

It was her third year in a firm that had not slipped a cog. She had likened its growth to her child's--fine--st.u.r.dy--normal. There were seven theaters now, lying at points between New York and Denver, a quickening nervous system of them with New York its ganglia. An eighth had just been acquired, through which transaction she had endured with a vicarious anxiety that amazed her. There had been arduous after office hours of deed, mortgage, and bill of sale, and to growing demands had invested herself with power of notary public, proclaiming the same in a neat sign above her desk.

It was the day of the consummation of this last deal, a Bronx Family Theater, in fact, that occurred between the brothers one of those bloodless chasms no wider than a sword blade, but hilt-deep.

After a morning series of conferences with two representatives of Philadelphia capital and the vice president of a Surety Guarantee Company, Lilly in her new capacity thumping down on doc.u.ment after doc.u.ment that slid beneath her punch, the transfer was completed, and, bursting out into the corridor, rather hoyendish with elation, she drew up shortly to avoid collision with Robert Visigoth, himself still warm with the occasion.

"Well," he said, slapping the side pockets of his waistcoat, "we pulled it off, didn't we?" The possibility of an evening train back to Chicago and of a big deal creditably accomplished quickening his well-being.

"Indeed we did!" she replied, heartily.

More and more, on these intermittent visits of his, the icy edge of her self-consciousness was beginning to thaw. Probably because the years had done their sebaceous worst with him. Somehow he had receded behind the dumpling of himself.

"Have you seen this one of Rufus II, Mrs. Penny? I want to show you a picture of a youngster with some kick to him. Look at those legs, will you!"

He had married, three years previous, a Miss Hindle Higginbothom, the only child of a Chicago leaf-lard magnate of household-word kind of fame, and brother-in-law to his father's one-time law partner, O.J.

Higginbothom.

For three years now, as if caught in a suet destiny, he had lived in the Lake Sh.o.r.e mansion of his father-in-law, making the Western city his official headquarters for as long as seven and eight-month periods.

Ten, the year his first child was born.

Often his wife accompanied him on his trips to New York. She was an enormous girl, looking ten years her senior, but with that fat kind of prettiness which a.s.serts itself so often in clear skin and apple cheeks.

Her capitulation to matrimony, rather than to Robert Visigoth, was complete. She was one of those inevitable mothers with little broody household ways that no immense wealth could dissipate. The first year there were twins. One of them died, but annually thereafter, until there were six, she presented a chuckling grandfather with a literal heir.

Literal, because on each such nativity old Rufus Higginbothom, who had found it easier to make millions than to learn to write, signed his famous "X" to a five-hundred-thousand-dollar check of greeting to the new arrival.

Robert Visigoth carried photographs of his babies and wife in a leather pocket portfolio, referring to it constantly and with a great show of casualness, "Oh, by the way, have I ever shown you--"

Lilly returned this to him now, with a rush of amused pleasure at the bouncing rotundities of his newest born.

"He's a darling!"

"He was a little croupy before I left and I'm taking that six-three for Chicago, Mrs. Penny, and I wonder if you would do something for me. I'm caught empty-handed. Would you take a cab down to Ryan and Steger's (the wife says they are the best for stouts) and select me a couple of right n.o.bby waists for her? Get the best, and you know pretty much about size.

The largest--you know. A few pairs of black silk stockings, extra quality and extra size, would be nice, too. It would save me considerable rush."

"I'll do my best."

"Well, that will be a darn sight better than the wife's when it comes to clothes. She gets them tubby. Pick out something slick--on the order of what you've got on."

"Why, this is only a two-dollar blouse!"

He flipped her a one-hundred-dollar bill.

"Don't come back with any change."

Late in the afternoon of this day which had transmitted its tremor of large transaction throughout the offices, long since part.i.tioned off into ground-gla.s.s cells and softened with sound-eating rugs, Lilly was summoned to the office of R.J., carrying with her the box containing her purchases. Bruce was there, too, pacing between windows.

He met her up with an immediate inquiry.