Yet within a week Mrs. Becker, through all the fog of her bewilderment, was embroidering seed pearls on her granddaughter's white graduation slippers.

Forty years of dogged loyalty to the white string ties, fresh every day, had gone down before seventeen's mandate; and to Ben Becker's unspeakable sheepishness, he had appeared one evening in an impeccable dark-blue knitted cravat, his collar, of cut heretofore easily inclusive of chin, snugger to his neck, and flowing out to slight points.

"So you let her bamboozle you into something I couldn't accomplish in thirty-eight years," was Mrs. Becker's sole comment through a mouthful of seed pearls.

"Nonsense! The child has ideas. These collars don't dig in."

"Humph! She's had you around her little finger from the start."

"Now, Carrie, why do you say that?"

"Because it's true," trying not to smile.

It was.

An immediate entente cordiale had shaped itself around Zoe and her grandfather. She named him with her usual fantastic aptitude.

"Dapple-dear," she would have it, and could not explain the choice. It must have been some such remote analogy as his likeness to an old dapple-gray family horse, patient flanked and thoroughly imperturbable to the fleck of the whip.

Her grandmother she promptly christened "Tippy," also for a reason she could not or would not divulge. But one evening, to her secret amusement, Lilly found a sheet of paper in the litter of the desk, jotted all over with Zoe's joyous scrawl, "Zantippe," in every case the first syllable crossed out.

All but Albert. She addressed him quite studiedly, "Father," her teeth coming down in a little bite over her lower lip, her use of the term never failing to elicit the rush of red to his ears.

He seemed tranced, falling into all plans, just so they included the presence of his mother-in-law, without comment. To her proverbial apron strings he kept firm hold, literally not permitting her out of his sight. Even when he addressed Lilly or his daughter his gaze was straight for Mrs. Becker, and the flags of her moral support that he must have had the eyes to see waving for him in her glance.

The impending interview began to take on the proportions of a delayed tooth-pulling. Repeatedly Lilly had cleared the way for it; just as repeatedly he had fled to cover. A week passed.

Meanwhile something disquieting happened. It developed in further correspondence from Washington on the matter of canteen equipment, that there was some thought of sending Albert to France. An increased stolidity was his sole reaction, but there was no doubt that the prospect of an impending ocean trip weighed heavily.

The submarine situation, at a time when the seas were sown with the menace of sudden death, was of greatest and worrying concern to him.

No new device was overlooked. His room at the hotel was littered with rubber suits, guaranteed to keep the body floating upright for thirteen hours. Adjustable cork life savers. Patent propellers. Wings.

There was talk, in the face of the impending contingency, of applying for a commission. Albert in olive drab! To Lilly he would not conjure.

But meanwhile, to the slow champings of a huge governmental machine in travail, there was little to do but wait, and in the interim not a day that he and Mrs. Becker failed to follow up this or that newest device against bone-cracking seas.

"Albert, there must be a way out! Don't tell me there are not plenty of
men who could help install canteen service. Let them send Vincent
Bankhead. He's younger. You leave it to me if they decide to send you.
I'll find you a way out. It's done every day."

"Wait until I'm called, mother; then there's time to act."

But his eyes were worried.

One day when the strain of holding together the precarious threads of the situation was becoming almost more than she could bear, and the end of the ten-day vacation period she was allowing herself from the office was at hand, Lilly spread three matinÉe tickets out on the table of a tea room where the five of them were lunching.

"Zoe, you and your grandparents are going to the Hippodrome this afternoon. Albert and I will take a walk or a drive and meet you at the hotel afterward."

"Mother, you come, too."

"No, Albert, Lilly's right. I want this thing settled. I want something decided or I'll go mad. My husband has got me muzzled; I'm afraid to open my mouth; but if I don't know something soon, I'll go crazy. Why are we here? When are we all going back? I don't like it here. I can't stand the noise. My servant girl is out there eating me out of house and home. I didn't even lock the grocery closet; that is the state of excitement I left home in. Something has got to be settled. The minute I open my mouth to talk about what is in the back of all our heads, everybody shushes me up. Now you two go and talk it out. I want to go home. I want us all to go home. I'm a wreck. I—"

"Carrie—"

"Oh, I'll shut up! Next time you travel with me, get me a muzzle. All I'm good for is to bear the brunt of everything. You've dribbled my head full of enough these last seventeen years to drive any woman but me crazy. But with her, it's a soft mouth. I'll shut up, but for God's sake settle things. I'm going crazy. I can't stand it."

The look of one trapped settled over Albert,

"I think I'd rather walk," he said; "those cabs are reckless and the meters run up so."

"Don't curl up your lips so, Lilly, over a little economy. Albert's right. What good does it do you to earn, the way you spend? Your husband has forty thousand dollars to show, and what have you to show? Taxicab rides don't draw any interest. Don't be so ready to curl up your lips."

"Why, mamma, you imagine things!" And to Albert, "Of course, let's walk."

For two hours, then, oftentimes stopping to face each other, they paced the wind-swept rectangle of the reservoir in Central Park, spring out in the air, but quite a tear of breeze across their high place.

He was sullen, casuistic, and impenetrable as a sea wall under a dashing, and the thought came to her that had he presented any other surface it would have been easier.

"Well, Albert," she began, facing him there in the wide afternoon light, "what is there that we two can say to each other?"

"Words," he said, stodgy in his bitterness, "mean nothing against seventeen years."

"You're right. And yet—I want you to know, Albert—before you go across—"

"Don't be too sure you'll be rid of me that way."

"Or before you go back home—that she is yours as much as mine and—"

"Generous," he said, dryly.

She could have beaten her head with a sense of futility.

"You've been a bad woman with a streak of devil in you. Tried to ruin my life, but I didn't let you. No, siree! I've worked things out. I've gotten on. I'm big in my way—in my business—in my home."

"Albert, I love to hear you say that!"

"You! You don't love anything or anybody outside yourself."

"Why? Because I took my chance to save myself from everything I—I hated! Not you—not they—but everything it stands for out there. Does self-preservation imply only selfishness?"

"Whatever it implies," he answered, stung to dark red by his effort for quick retort, "you're selfish—rotten selfish. But you haven't kept me down. I've gotten up these eighteen years—and you—you—Bah!"

"You've been happy, Albert? Tell me you have."

"Happy! I'm not a hog for happiness. You to inquire about my happiness! Lots you care! I've had my share of contentment. Contented as a man can be in a community where he has kept up a farce for seventeen years that his wife is off with his consent studying opera. But I've kept my name—kept it in spite of you. I don't know what's been what with you. Guess if the truth is known, I'm afraid to think what's what!"

"Albert—"

"Oh, I don't put anything past you. I don't even know if that girl is mine. For all I know you're a—"

"Albert!"

"Bah! I don't put anything past you!"

She faced his words as if they were blows, letting them rain.

"You're lying, Albert," she said, evenly. "She's yours and you know it."

"I've kept my name! Kept it and tried to make it up to your parents, who deserved better than you!"

She quivered and the red that sprang out in her face was almost purple, and yet by her silence bared her chest for more, as if grateful for the sting of the lash.

"Bah! Don't be afraid. I don't want to know anything, but I'm not the booby I may seem to you. When a woman has lived around this way for all these years, in with a gang of show folks—Bah! I don't want to know." And spat.

"She's yours, Albert, and you know it. You know it!"

"Yes, I guess she is, from the look of her, not that I put anything past you. But that's your business. You're nothing to me. I'm cured of you. You couldn't make me suffer the way they do in books. I've kept my name, so if it's divorce you have on your brain, you might as well get it out, because—"

"No, Albert—"

"I've kept my name, whatever you've done to yours. Your life is your business. But the girl. That's where I have a right or two coming to me."

She was prepared for just this, but somehow when it came it was a full moment before she could answer, for the rush of fear that choked her.

"That's for—for Zoe to decide."

"That's for me to decide. She goes to a decent, respectable home where she belongs. You're not fit to raise her. Look at what you made of her. A fine specimen. A short-haired freak with all your crazy ideas thriving in her head. You've ruined your life, but you didn't succeed in ruining mine and you won't ruin hers. You and your stage-struck notions that never got you anywhere. She's going home where she belongs!"

She could hardly breathe for keeping down the rising tide of her terror, but her eyes were always cold for him.

"Your daughter has a lyric-soprano voice, and however little that may mean to you she is going to delight the world with it some day. One of the great masters of the world has made her his protÉgÉe. She is preparing for her audition—her hearing—in the fall, and it is even possible she may be singing in grand opera next season. You cannot—"

"I'll see her dead first. You were an opera bird, too. I'll see her dead first before I let her make a zero mark out of her life as her crazy mother did before her."

"Albert, can't you see! Zoe's the wine. You, mamma—papa—the vine. I don't count. I—I'm sort of the grape—that fermented—you see! She's me—plus. Her arm is long enough to touch what she wants. Mine wasn't. I saw it, but I couldn't reach. I was one generation too underdone. You cannot have Zoe. I cannot. She doesn't belong to you or me. She belongs to life. She's not mine. She is only my success; she—"

"She—goes—home!"

"No!"

"Why in God's name did you get me on here? You don't expect to see me stand by and countenance your craziness?"

"Why! Why! I've asked it ever since the moment I sent the wire. Why! I had to do it somehow—a fear of—something—war—life—death—but you shall not have her. Not unless she decides it that way. No. Never!"

"I'm a slow thinker! And slower to act. That's been my trouble. But this time the bit is between my teeth. I've a family now and family obligations. Don't be so sure yet that I'm on my way overseas. There is a way around every situation if you look for it hard enough. My place is here now. Home! My daughter goes home!"

She could see in profile the heavy jaw clamp upward, and more and more that wooden stodginess became terrible to her. In a flash-back she could see those seventeen years of beefsteak suppers; his temples at-their trick of working. Seventeen years all cluttered up with bed casters, bathtub stoppers, and poultry wiring. That party back there at Flora's. The lotto and tiddledywinks tables laid out. Page Avenue on a summer's day with the venders hawking down it—ap-ples—twenty cents a peck—ap-ples. Zoe—caught!

She closed over his wrists with a little predatory grip.

"Albert, don't do that! Don't take her back. She'll claw you like a wild eagle in a cage—out there. She belongs to the world. In the fall she sings for Auchinloss. It may lead to anything! Albert—you ask why I sent for you. Let her be. Let her stay here with Mrs. Blair—a friend—a dear—good friend of mine. Her education—Take me, Albert. Take me home—Albert."

At her hand on his wrist something raced over him like the lick of a flame; he pressed against her with the entire length of his body and his lips were moist.

"Lilly," he said, very darkly red and trying to clasp her about the waist, "I'll take you! I oughtn't, but I will. Come back, Lilly, and make it up to me for all these years. Being near you makes me forget everything except that—you are near me. I've missed you all these years—I guess—but never so much as this minute. You've gotten so handsome with the years. Something—Come home, Lilly—make it up to me. Give me—your—your lips!"

She kept retreating before the dark red and the moist lips which he wet more and more with his tongue.

"Will you leave her be—then—Albert? Here?"

"Lilly—your lips—give me."

"Will you, Albert—leave her here—Zoe?"

She could feel the scald of his breathing.

"Yes—if you come."

"You promise?"

"Yes, Lilly. Your lips—let me."

Suddenly he had her to him, there in the light darkness of the deserted square of reservoir, kissing her so that his mouth smeared over toward her ear.

She was not quick enough entirely to avert her face, and in the embrace his Adam's apple was against her throat so that she could feel it beat, and with her nails biting into her palm to keep her from screaming, she was shrieking over and over to herself at his nearness: "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!"