"Can't help it--can't help it," her lips bubbling. "I'm bursting with it. All these years. I can't hold in. What mother could?"

Only their arrival at the hotel stemmed the rising tide, but, once up in their aerial suite of rooms, the last bell hop tipped out, then broke the storm wave, flaying them all.

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

Years--O G.o.d--years--"

"Mamma--mamma--"

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

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

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

There was an air of indescribable prosperity that rose off Mr. Becker, in the nondescript but excellent quality of the gray suiting, the polished, square-toed, custom-made shoes, the little linen string of necktie, one for each day, the kind, despite family suasion, he had always worn. But it was difficult for him to speak now because he was always blinking and looking off.

"You've given us a great sorrow to bear, Lilly," he said, in a tone of rehea.r.s.ed reproach. "We tried to be thankful for our health and--bear our--"

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

Years! Years of explaining lies to the community. Years of holding up our heads over an opera singer that n.o.body ever hears about and that never came home to her folks. Years of feeling them laugh behind our backs--your father and husband trying to hold up their heads in business under the lie. What have I ever done, I've asked myself all these years--to deserve it? I've never harmed anyone. I've--"

"Carrie--please."

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

"I've a well-paid position with a producing firm, mamma, and I live nicely. You shall see, dear."

"Producing? Producing what? Trouble? A position! For that she threw away her life. Her big talk of prima donna, and we find her in a position.

The girl that was going to set the world on fire. That's why we looked our eyes out all these years for her name in the paper, only to find her in a position! Ben, what have we ever done to deserve it? Albert, I'm her mother, but my heart bleeds for you--"

He was tugging at his bag straps, industriously keeping his head averted, but the red up in his ears.

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

She licked up at the taste of her tears.

"It's wrapped in between your socks. You're standing in a draught, Albert; close that window. You heard that man in the train about the epidemic of colds that is starting all over the country. O my G.o.d! I'm just so upset. And now that it has happened everything is so different.

I could tear out my tongue for what I want to say and I can't say anything--not so much your father and I--at least we had Albert to help make it up to us. We know what a son he has been, don't we, Ben, but to think of him, the upstandingest boy that ever wore shoe leather--him having to suffer for it--"

"Carrie, Carrie, it's time to go over all that later. Let's get our bearings. Lilly, you've not changed except for the bones kind of setting and--"

"I don't like you in those shirt waists. Too mannish. The lace I used to dress that child in! The way I used to love to poke in the bins--sacrificed for her. These years--years. Lilly--tell me you've been a good girl--that your sinning has only been against us--child that I raised--Lilly--"

They were locked in embrace again, Mrs. Becker blown hot and cold by the ever-shifting clouds of her emotions, the two men standing by in a state of helplessness that was always in inverse proportion to the lavalike eruptions from the crater of her nerves.

"Mother, father and I will leave you alone for a while and you have your talk together first--"

"No! She's your wife. You have yours first! It's about time you were coming into some of your rights!"

Such a fiery redness was out in Albert's ears that against the lights they were of the translucency of red-hot iron, and even through her pity for his _malaise_, her old poignant distaste of him would not be laid.

She wanted him to lunge somehow with that bull-like head of his with the bashedin squareness to its top, but since nothing like that happened, she sprang up instead, grasping her mother's hand.

"Not now," she cried. "I want to tell you all something first, and then I want to take you--to my place--to see where--the way I live--"

"Yes," said Mrs. Becker, rising with a crinkling of nose and drawing her marabout boa about her, "I want to see the way you live--first. Guests of hers at a hotel like this. A position, she tells me.

Lilly--Lilly--for G.o.d's sake tell me you've been a good girl--"

"Carrie!" At the sound of rare thunder in her husband's voice she did subside then. Later she began.

"Nice rooms. Nicer than in Chicago that time. Albert, let me give you a clean handkerchief out of the valise.... No, you don't know where they are. Don't like that shirt waist. Too mannish. Don't worry about those pillows, Albert. I brought your little one along. Gla.s.s tops. That's nice, isn't it? How would you like one for your chiffonier at home, Albert? Quit whittling toothpicks on the floor, Ben--Oh dear! if somebody don't say something, I'll scream--"

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

But once within the cab and with her mother's constant runnel of talk and its threat of hysteria, courage failed Lilly, so she sat back, holding herself against rising panic and her mind refusing to hook tentacles into the situation toward which they were speeding.

"You look mighty well, Lilly," her father would repeat, gently; "not much changed, but a little more settled--in the bones--"

"Who does your darning and mending?"

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

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

Just stores and stores like there are on Olive Street. Oh, look! There is one of the Ryan Cut Price Drug Stores, just like we have at home.

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

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

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

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

"Now, Carrie--"

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

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

"Why, I guess it ought to take about ten minutes from here," replied Lilly, grateful for the question and trying to meet his averted glance.

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

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

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

"Albert, close that window next to you."

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