She drew the screen finally about the little davenport, fussing at the room, straightening it into a sort of formality with a woman's intuition for this chair one-half inch closer to the hearth and that picture ever so slightly straighter. The sheer frock she hung up in a closet, covering it with a shroud of tissue paper, wadding her daughter's none-too-carefully flung stockings into her shoes and tiptoeing to place them beside the davenport. They were strong, ribbed stockings, still warm and full of curves. She stroked over each. Once she paused at the mantelpiece mirror, drawing back her lip from the even whiteness of her teeth, perusing her points rather absent-mindedly.

Time had handled Lilly with a caress. At past thirty she was herself at twenty, with even more youth, because at twenty she had looked herself almost ten years hence. She had rounded out a bit, but not fatly. If stouter at all, it was only in the slightly deeper look to the cream-colored skin. There were two lines across her forehead, but they had been there at eighteen and were quite obviously the result of tilting her eyebrows so that the flesh folded; and besides, they relieved her clearness, these horizontal traceries, of utter limpidity.

She had drifted, not all unconsciously, into a certain picturesque uniformity of dress and could smile now over the large, cart-wheel hats, coarse embroideries, and short-vamp shoes; neither was she often above mentally contrasting herself in her annual seventy-five dollar suit of dark-blue serge, natty sailor hat, and impeccable blouse, with a certain coffee-colored linen with its slashings of coffee-dipped embroidery, and the blouse that twirled with yards and yards of cotton Valenciennes.

There was still something of the look of the nun to Lilly, but a bit too pinkly, as if she had dressed the part for Act One, but wore the ballet skirts for Act Two underneath.

Her reaction asserted itself in her child. At thirteen Zoe wore straight frocks of navy-blue alpaca with wide patent-leather belts and deep Eton collars. They were mistaken sometimes, and, strangely enough, to Lilly's invariable chagrin, for sisters, and Lilly, in her refutation, could be smitingly swift.

At nine o'clock, to the staccato of three rings, she admitted Bruce Visigoth, leading him down the tube of hallway. It annoyed her unspeakably that Harry Calvert, collarless, poked out his head from a doorway as they passed, and she was suddenly conscious of the smell of stew. She had meant to burn an incense stick.

But she walked with that free, Hellenic stride of hers, without apology and ahead of him.

"This is our room. Zoe is asleep there behind that screen. Won't you sit down?"

He placed his hat and a light bamboo stick across the center table, obviously oppressed with a sense of close quarters.

"Tell you what! Suppose we taxi over to Claremont. It's mild enough to sit out on the terrace."

She met him with her levelest gaze.

"Aren't you going to be comfortable here?"

"Of course I am. There you go, getting sensitive right off. Only it is a warmish evening, and why keep the sun-child awake?"

"Zoe can sleep," she said, with the barely perceptible arch to her brows, "even through the fire of your presence."

"Good!" he said, seating himself in great good nature and trying not to be quizzical. "So this is where you live."

He was frankly curious, his gaze humorous, but traveling over details, his head upflung and the scenting movement to his nostrils. He had not changed in weight, but in compactness and as if the house of his being had settled with a fine kind of firmness. He was a bit squarer of jaw and shoulder and ever so prematurely, and to the enormous fancy of women, inclined to a hoar frost of gray at the temples.

She seated herself across the little square of table.

"You don't seem to care for us here."

"Certainly I do, only—only—"

"Only what?"

"Only—well, hanged if I make you out, lady. This place—it just isn't you—that's all."

"Nonsense! I don't count. I'm just a sort of a means to an end, anyway."

"What end?"

"The wine!"

"The what?"

"Oh, nothing," she said, and laughed.

"Laugh again."

"Why?"

"I like it."

She looked her most serio-comic disapproval and held up a forefinger with a warning little waggle to it.

"Please," she said, with an inlay of something deeper in her voice, "don't begin by spoiling things."

"Rather not," he said. "I'm going to live up to your letter of the law."

Except for the frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus tÊte-À-tÊte. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a Saturday, the day of Zoe's invariable luncheon downtown and subsequent opera matinee, he had strolled by what seemed mischievous chance into the tea room where they were dining, but the occasion had hardly been a success. There had been a great deal of badinage between him and Zoe, but Lilly had finished her meal almost in silence. The day following, a toy piano of complete range and really excellent workmanship had arrived. She returned it without showing it to Zoe. These incidents lay between them now.

"So this is where you live," he repeated, as if his long curiosity could not find satiety in fact.

"That I have an abode seems to amaze you."

"It does. You're such a detached sort. You rise so above the mundane things that clutter up life, that it is pretty much of a shock to realize that you use tooth powder and carry a latchkey. It's hard to reconcile Chopin and George Sand probably to those famous raw-meat sandwiches they loved to eat at midnight. Well, that's about the way I feel about you—hemmed in by—dull reality such as this."

"I like raw-meat sandwiches," she said.

"Me too."

They laughed.

She took up a sheaf of manuscript.

"If it doesn't bore you too much, I'm going to read it straight through."

"Oh, I forgot; the play, of course."

She looked up at him as if over spectacles.

"What else?"

"You say it has been the rounds?"

"Yes. Peddled in every office in New York. Kline and Alshuler kept it two years. Forensi paid her two hundred and fifty dollars advance on it and then let his option lapse. For another year there was some talk of Comstock and Comstock doing it, and then finally Hy Wolff got hold of it and the very month he died paid her a second two hundred and fifty to renew his option on it. I've always felt that if Ida had kept after Hy Wolff he would have produced it. He had faith in it, but somehow just didn't seem to get to it. You see, Ida hasn't any gumption—not the kind of aggressiveness the game demands. That is why in fifteen years you scarcely know she is in your office. That is why I plunged in and tried to rewrite 'The Web' with her. It's a big story, sweated out of her own agony. She may never write another. Probably won't. My little part in it has merely been to help her co-ordinate—round up the jumble of her ideas, so to speak. There is a big play somewhere in this story. I know you didn't like it as a sketch—I didn't, either. A short play cannot contain this drama. But out of a clear sky it occurred to me that you might see it as a three-act play. Oh, I know it isn't the kind of thing you've your mind's eye on, but why not take that step over into the legitimate via a big popular success? It may pave the way to bigger, finer things. Who knows—Ida Blair—'The Web'—may mean the beginning of your dream come true."

His mouth had straightened and thinned.

"You're right there. Ultimately I'll get into the other. If my brother knew as much about the booking end as he does the realty, I'd have gone over long ago. That is the most the success of the Amusement Enterprise can mean to me—to afford some day the legitimate as a plaything. It costs money to educate the public to better things. It's been profitable playing down to its taste—some day it is going to enable me to afford to be sufficiently altruistic to foot the bills for serving up the best. It costs to educate.",

"Fine! And it is only a question of time until you are ready for that inspiring fray. Meanwhile, why not help foot those bills with a little side flier in 'The Web'?"

"You are a little opportunist, aren't you?".

"I know 'The Web' isn't art. But it is a cross section of reality with the veins exposed and the sap of life running through them. Mrs. Blair, poor dear, can't write. God knows I can't. That is why the play has been through years of lying around in every office in New York. But the idea is there. You see, it is everything she has lived through. You know her story?"

"Yes."

"There is a scene when he comes screaming out of the room after having been through the third degree, half blind from the terrible lights and the terrible circle of terrible eyes, that isn't writing at all. It's life—a raw, palpitating picture of a social abuse that can touch the public as a reform measure can never hope to. Then the character of the boy—a delinquent. We've one right here in this apartment. One of those sweet, shy, half-frightened boys as gentle as a girl. The kind that tells the neighborhood children Peter Pan and reads his grandmother to sleep. I would trust him anywhere with Zoe, and yet there's the streak! The criminal, congenital streak through him that is as pathological as measles. Only we handle it under the heading of criminology. It's like taking an earache to the chiropodist. The boy is a thief. It's through him like a rotten spot, but instead of curing him the law wants to punish him. It's like spanking a child for having the measles. But to get back—Mrs. Blair has him in this play—just as if she had lifted him out of this apartment. She wrote him from the life, too. A young fellow who used to be on her husband's beat. It may not be fine writing, but 'The Web' has the throb of reality through it, and it is my opinion that one pulsebeat of life is worth all your chastity of form."

"Right."

"We're one on that? Good! Well, here is your opportunity to solder the first link into the legitimate. Keep it in mind while I am reading Ida Blair's play and remember I am not talking Ida Blair or Lilly Penny to you. I'm talking this play just as I would talk an act to you. Because I believe in it."

He seemed to look at her through her words, a smile out in his eyes.

"You're not listening."

"I am," he said, "but your hair looks like it is painted on, the way it comes down to that smooth little peak in front. Jove! it's pretty."

She looked off, wanting not to color.

"Come," he said, "I apologize. Read. I'm as predisposed as I can be toward anything conceived by that little dormouse of a person in the office."

"That's the trouble. You men are too often satisfied with a surface inventory. The vault of heart sometimes yields up rare treasures."

"How like you to say that."

"Ready?"

"Go!"

And so, with her head bent so that the light burnished its smoothness, she read him "The Web" through two uninterrupted hours, her voice throbbing into the quiet. In the third act, when a half-crazed victim of the third degree is led out in shuddering and horrible invocation, she sprang to her feet for an instant, her gesture decrying its fullest arc.

She was like Iphigenia praying for death, he thought.

Later, when the shades of the prison house begin to dawn upon the stunned consciousness of the woman, there were tears in her voice and on her lashes, and one fell to the back of her hand, which she wiped off against her skirt, like a child.

At eleven o'clock she finished, regarding him brilliantly through her flush.

He had wanted to smoke, but thrust the case back into his pocket, sitting tilted, his hands locked at the back of his head and gazing at the line of the picture molding. Her lips parted as the paused held.

"Well?"

He uncrossed his knees, straightening.

"Well?"

"Strong."

"Then it did grip you?"

"Yes, but I can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an out-and-out—what shall I say?—an out-and-out crook play, to coin a phrase."

"Exactly. It is a section of life about which your average playgoer knows little or nothing and yet one for which he nourishes a tremendous curiosity."

"It's crude—"

"I know, but the idea is bigger than the writing is crude. If I had the money I would take a chance on producing it to-morrow. It has social and sociological value, and at the same time is corking-good entertainment. I read the police-inspector scene to my little girl just to see what she would get out of it. 'Why,' she cried, 'a man would confess to anything with that white light on him and those big policemen's eyes on him. That's not fair! That shouldn't be allowed. Isn't there a way to stop it?' That from a thirteen-year-old! It's one of those man-made abuses that if we women ever get the vote we'll go after! Don't answer me on this play now, Mr. Visigoth. Take it to your hotel. Read it over again. Talk it over with your brother when he comes next week. How's that? No snap judgment."

"Good. The play is on the docket for the evening. Now let us get the taste of the underworld out of our mouths. How would the Claremont appeal now?"

"I'd rather not."

"Well, I suppose that amounts to my congÉ?"

She smiled with her brows arched.

"It is after eleven."

He was incessantly feeling for his cigarette case and then with a certain unease refraining.

"You may," she said, "one, before you go."

He held the case to her. She took one gingerly, accepting the light more gingerly.

"I don't like them," she said, exhaling with the violence of the unaccustomed.

"Then whyfore?"

"Because it is a stupid convention which says that a man may and a woman may not. Why should it be a matter of course for you and, in most cases, a matter of comment and even vulgarity for me?"

"Usage."

"Usage isn't a reason. It's Time's trick for applying the brake to progress."

He lit up gratefully, waving out the match and hesitating for a spot to dispose of it. She reached across the table, palm up. "Give me."

He caught her hand.

"Lilly!"

She jerked back with a little clicky catch of breath.

"Don't."

"Lilly, you're maddening! Lilly, can't you see what I haven't the words to tell you? For years—since that night at the Waldorf—I—I have been living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play. Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?"

She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing.

"You don't know what you are saying!"

"I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable woman in the world—and for me."

She held out his hat and cane.

"My little girl is asleep. Hadn't you better go?"

"That's not fair," he said, taking the hat and cane, but flushing up furiously.

"I know it isn't. But what is there I can say to you?"

"You can talk it out. Man to man."

"Sit down," she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through swimming and revealing eyes.

"Now—what is there to say—Bruce—between you and me?"

"Where is he?"

"You know."

"Are matters unchanged?"

She nodded.

"I love you, Lilly."

"And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the triangle a rectangle."

"You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good God! women don't martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!"

"It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!"

"Mock heroics."

"No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations. Albert Penny and divorce are irreconcilable. Tear his heart out if you will, but hands off his respectability. It may sound absurd in the face of the enormity of what I have done to him, but it is a great solace to me to be able to sacrifice that much to him and to drag him through my life like a ball and chain. Somehow it seems that I ought to suffer that."

"Stuff and nonsense! You made your mistake and you had the courage to tear away from it by the roots. Unless those roots have a drag?"

"No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her? Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will? Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe's father doesn't know that he is a father?"

"Good God!"

"Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better."

"You mean to say you have fought this out alone?"

"He doesn't know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She's a beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is her garden in which to bloom and expand."

"In all these years they don't know your whereabouts?"

"Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers. I keep them pretty well under glass. It's all so dreamlike—I've always been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between the dream and reality."

He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close.

"Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness."

"All my life I have done that."

"I cannot put you out of my heart now that I have put you in."

"No. No. No." But his embrace had already shaped itself, and, springing back from it and her own singing of the flesh, she crowded up against the wistaria-painted screen, shielding it.

"How dared you—here—in this—room! With her!"

"Lilly!"

"Go, please! Go, please!"

"You mean that?"

"You know I do."

He bent low in the attitude of kissing her hand, but without touching it.

"Forget everything I've said, Lilly, and forgive. We'll go back to the old. Good night, Lilly! Mrs. Penny."

He must have departed on the balls of his feet, because presently through the roaring of the silence she heard the door slam without having been conscious of his passage down the hallway; and then, after a second, Harry Calvert tiptoeing to her open door to look in with his light-blue eyes.

She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it.

"Don't," she cried through it—"don't you ever dare do that again, Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like that—you—you—frighten—me."

Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat's flank, silently, to save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child's.

Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe's hand crept up, finding out her mother's cheek.

"Lilly," floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of consciousness—"Lilly—you're crying. Are—you sad—again?"

"Yes, Zoe—terribly—terribly—"