"No. No. No. You played unfair. You took me--unawares. You misunderstood me horribly--most horribly."

"You mean--"

"Why, you--you _boy!_ What has happened cannot make any difference between you and me. It was outrageous of you--silly _boy_ you--to--to take advantage. After all that has pa.s.sed--all these years--it is unthinkable that you didn't understand. Why, you--you _boy!_"

She saw his jaw fall and the sense of his ridiculousness set in.

"What has merely been absurd all along you have suddenly made intolerant. You make more imperative my resignation. You must understand--Mr. Visigoth--under what conditions I will consent to remain here these few weeks."

The words were so stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he had been slapped.

"Lilly, for G.o.d's sake, you--you cannot be serious!"

"No mock heroics--please."

His ears tipped with flame; he straightened back from her.

"No more mock heroics," he said, in a voice suddenly quieted down like vichy gone stale. "Forgive an old--fool--a young--fool--and forget it.

Thank you for jerking me up."

He raised her limp hand, bowing over it until his lips hovered but did not touch.

"My solemn word on it this time--no more--mock--heroics." And still Lilly, on the click of the door after him, could not clear her brain of the running threnody of nonsense:

People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma.

CHAPTER XII

Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact, when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her in Ida Blair's Long Island bungalow.

They were a group diverse of emotion and perilous to one another's nerves this last morning.

MRS. BECKER: "I think I'd better write my girl another postal to be sure and have supper ready when we get home Thursday night. There is some canned salmon in the grocery closet, I forgot to mention, and she can borrow a few potatoes from the Shriners for frying, until I get a chance to lay in supplies when I get home. Poor Albert! How he loved creamed salmon and fried potatoes! Ben, help me to realize what has happened.

O G.o.d, I--"

MR. BECKER: "Now, Carrie."

MRS. BECKER: "The Shriners are nice neighbors, Lilly. They are the only ones besides us on the block who stuck after the street began to go down. You'll like Edna Shriner. You remember her? Pock-marked. She used to be in your dancing-school cla.s.s. She never married, but how she keeps that little home for her old father! Kitchen floor! You could eat off it. And as handy a body with the needle as ever lived. Her French knots.

The guest-towels that girl has French-knotted."

LILLY (to herself): "Salmon and fried potatoes. Page Avenue. Shriners.

Funny!--O G.o.d!--Why--Oh!--Oh!--Funny!--"

ZOE: "Lilly, feel my heart, how it beats."

It was as if Lilly could not take her eyes from off her daughter.

"Remember what Triest said, dearest, let your nerves be so many violin strings, tightening but not quivering."

"It's your going, Lilly--I--I can't seem quite to grasp it. You will come back to me soon--in two months--one--I couldn't stand it longer!"

"Yes, and, Zoe, you will write every day. Every little single thing.

Your work--your life--your friends--every tiny success--"

"Lilly, Lilly--don't go! It's madness. Stay, darling. I feel like a pig--all that money--his fortune. If you are not ent.i.tled to touch it, I am not--"

"You are his child and the only wrong you ever did him was through me."

"Lilly--don't go, darling--"

"Zoe, don't tear me to pieces."

"I'll work, darling, as I've never worked before."

"Zoe, Zoe, go straight to your mark."

"I--I can't realize it, Lilly. To-day! He's going to hear me to-day--this very afternoon. I--I feel as nervous at the prospect of singing before you as before him. I--I think I'm the luckiest girl in the world. Lilly, sometimes I--I--think life has--has sort of cleared the way for me to walk in its lovely places--you have cleared the way.

But what--what if he doesn't think I've the voice _maestro_ thinks I have? I couldn't stand that, Lilly--the way you stood it."

"But he will," said Lilly, a memory shaping itself. "Remember your power begins where mine left off. You heard Du Ga.s.s the year before she died, but you were too young to remember. Your voice is so much--so infinitely bigger, Zoe, and your knowledge and defiance of life and of the Auchinlosses--makes me so unafraid for you--"

"Kiss me, Lilly. I'm frightened--not of Auchinloss--or life--but of--Oh, I don't know--frightened of silliness, I guess."

"I'm not."

"But you're trembling."

"Of hope."

At eleven Lilly went down to her office. Leon Greenberg already had her desk. It was largely a matter now of sliding in the new prop before sliding out the old.

There were several farewell offerings from various of the older girls.

The immemorial trifles that women exchange. A bottle of eau de cologne.

The inevitable six handkerchiefs. A silver bodkin for running ribbon through lingerie. And from the booking department, a silk umbrella suitably engraved. She cried a little.

By noon the top of her desk was bare and the drawers empty.

She sat looking out over the waves of roofs of a city that had beaten her back at every turn, lashed her, and yet with the mysterious counterflow of oceans had carried her out a foot for every ten it flung her back.

She felt full of sobs, but quiet. Strangely quiet, as if the champing machinery of her life had stopped suddenly, leaving an hiatus that made her heart ache of pa.s.sivity.

At two o'clock, by appointment, came Zoe ... like a blaze of light. Her eyes with her mother's trick of iris, full of inner glow, and her blond hair so daringly boxed, set off with a droop of tam-o'-shanter.

There had been a new frock of heavy white crepe with a wide white hat for this occasion. Instead, with last-moment decision, she had come in one of the straight blue frocks, the wide patent-leather belt, a knot of orange and blue ribbon, representing her active membership in a local canteen service, at her throat. She came glowing through the daring simplicity, flamboyantly and to the nth power of Lilly's slower personality, her mother's child.

"Hurry, darling, I've a taxi waiting. We're to meet _maestro_ at the Opera House."