When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's passions was a gale through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a devastating one in a children's hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible passions lay just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl aged four had once been found battered and dead beside a farm hand's dinner pail in St. Louis County! Suddenly all the faces she could conjure began to form staring circles around her—the Visigoths. Minnie Dupree. Ida Blair. Auchinloss. Phonzie. Phonzie!

She decided to walk fast and long and ran downstairs out into the little areaway that ran like an alley from stage entrance to sidewalk. A newly installed nickelodeon, adjoining, was already lighted, throwing out a hard white shine and tinned music at the instance of five cents in the slot. In the glaring pallor Bruce Visigoth was suddenly at her side, his felt hat bunched up in his hand and his hair wet-looking, as if drenched with perspiration.

"I couldn't let you go without apologizing, Mrs. Penny."

She smiled with lips that would pull to the nervous impulse to cry.

"The idea!" she said, feeling the words tawdry and provincial as they came.

"It was my fault for permitting it to happen in the presence of a third party—you especially."

"Those things cannot always be avoided," again biting down into her tongue for its banality.

"Will you forget it as if it had never occurred?"

She turned her gaze, that could be so singularly clear, full upon him.

"It is already forgotten."

Strangely enough and with unspoken accord they took to walking then at a clip that was almost a rush and created quite a wind in their faces. It was their first meeting out of office and here they were half running through a cool and winey half darkness and utterly without destination.

She stopped abruptly at West Fourteenth Street, beyond the thunder of the Sixth Avenue Elevated and where the sky line began to dip down toward the piers.

"Good night," she said, throwing back her head to look up at him from under the low brim of sailor.

He whipped off his resiliently soft hat, hugging it under one arm.

"Of course," he said, "of course," mopping at his forehead and so unstrung that she could have laughed. "I'm sorry. I beg your pardon. Is this where you live?"

They were before a greasily lighted taxidermist's window of mounted raccoon, fox terrior with legs curled for running, and an owl on a branch.

"No," she said, eying the owl, "I don't live here," and were both off into a gale of laughter that swept down the barriers of self-restraint.

"We've both been walking it off," she said, easily. "Here is where I turn for home."

He caught her hand.

"D-don't go. I'd be so grateful—so grateful if you'd have dinner with me to-night."

"Nonsense!" she said, amazed at her fluency of manner. "You're a bit unstrung, that's all. Look in at your club or a show."

"Please."

"All right," she said, suddenly, on a little click of teeth. "I'll come—this once."

"You're a brick," he cried, releasing her hand with a grateful pressure.

She was excited out of all proportions to the event, flushing up with a sense of adventure and crowded moment.

He began to scan for a cab.

"Let's walk."

"Not a bit of it," bringing one down with a cane. "We're out on a party."

"But—"

"No buts," helping her in and climbing in after. "Waldorf."

"I'm too shirtwaisted."

"Nothing of the kind. You're as trim as a dime. I like those waists you wear. They make you look smooth—shining. That's it, you've a shine to you."

The odor of another drive in an open cab through this same snarl of traffic was winding about her like mist. That doctor's outer office with its row of thoughtful chairs. Rembrandt's "Night-Watch." That frenzied moment of finding the lock! The run up two flights. She sat forward on the slippery leather seat.

"I—I shouldn't have come."

"If you're serious, of course I'll take you home. But I can't tell you how much I want you not to feel that way."

She sat back again.

"I'm behaving like a shop girl."

They both laughed again and complete thaw set in.

He selected one of the lesser dining rooms where the formality of evening clothes was still the rule, but here and there a couple like themselves, in street attire. It was her first New York meal that was not read off a badly thumbed menu and eaten off thick-lipped china. A stringed orchestra played the Duo of Parsifal and Kundry, which was enough to set the blood rocking in her veins and some of its bombastic maternal passion to dye her face.

He ordered a man's dinner: Clear soup with croÛtons. Long oysters on the half shell. A thick steak with potatoes deliciously concocted beneath a crust of cheese. Light wine. Ices in long glasses as slender as the neck of a crane. Turkish coffee brewed at the table over alcohol.

She sighed out finally, warm with well-being: "I didn't realize how deadly tired I was of just—grub. You see, it's the first time I've dined at a first-class place since I'm in New York."

"You don't mean that."

She nodded, smiling.

"I think I'm as surprised as you are. It's just one of the things that never occurred to me."

He regarded her for a long moment and without smile.

"You queer, queer girl."

"If anyone tells me that again, I'll begin to believe it is my inevitable epitaph."

"No epitaph is inevitable. It is what you write it."

She leaned her chin into the cup of her palm.

"Do you think that?"

"Yes, and therefore yours should embody courage and dauntless idealism and love of truth."

She looked off through the atmosphere that was talcy with soft odors and the warm perfume of bare shoulders.

"Love of truth," she said, her eyes lit, "would be enough."

"Love of you, would be an epitaph to my liking."

She was afraid he could see the little beating at her throat and wanted to be facetious. Poor Lilly, to whom persiflage came none too readily.

"Now, you're making sport of me."

"Probably it is a case of laugh that I may not weep."

"Even tears can be idle."

"Or idolizing."

"I suppose I am to surmise over the quality of yours?"

"Well, you have had me guessing for three years. Mrs. Penny. Lilly! I can't say the other, it—won't s-say itself."

She asked her question with a cessation of her entire being, as if her heart had missed a beat.

"Hasn't—your—brother—told—you—anything?"

"Oh yes. I know how you threw over the professional end of it for what you decided you could do better. I thought that pretty plucky; so many of us mistake inflated judgment for genius and stubbornness for perseverance, when that same perseverance applied to the job within one's capacity may lead to fine fulfillment."

"It's good to hear you say that."

"But that is about all I do know—Lilly—except, of course, that there is a youngster and somewhere in the background a husband whom I would like to meet out some dark night when I happen to be wearing my favorite pair of brass knuckles."

Something nameless and shapeless had lifted; there was a gavotte to her heartbeat.

"My husband was—is a good man."

"But not a wise one if he couldn't hold a creature like you."

"And my child! You talk about shine! Of course I know it is only her hair and eyes and now her little teeth, but sometimes it seems to me there is an actual iridescence to her. Just as real as the gold circlets the Italians loved to paint about heads they adored."

"Your head is—"

"You see, the fuzz of her curls gives that effect. Those new stereopticon views that move, that we used on the bills last week, show it—that aura off the hair. Even the nurses and Mrs. Dupree have remarked Zoe's. She's really the show child of the place, you know."

"By inheritance?"

"No. She's only like me about the eyes, and like—him—in the honey color of her hair. Hers is as brilliant and curly as mine is dull and smooth. And she's so big. So golden and burstingly big. I can't look at her without fairly gasping, 'can this be mine'!"

"And to think a man let you go, once he had you captured."

"He didn't let go. I went. I can never hear him referred to slightingly without feeling myself a rotter not to explain. My husband was so terribly all he should have been, Mr. Visigoth. As decent and God-fearing a man as ever—chewed his beefsteak with his temples."

He threw back his head for one of his sustained laughs.

"It's horrid of me to belittle him. Let me explain further."

"Lord! you don't need to. I know everything about him there is to know. A fine, hefty truck horse trying to do teamwork with a red-nostriled filly."

"I—I think that's it—I've never been able to get it across to anyone before, but—"

"He was just cast wrong. That's all there is to be said against the chap. Right?"

"Exactly."

"I understand. In a way I'm in a similar position with my own brother. Only, I've stuck it out because it was my mother's great wish to see us get on together. After what you have observed these years, particularly to-day, none of this can be particularly new to you."

"I've noticed, of course, you—you're different."

"It is the little things about Robert I cannot swallow. Never could. He is the better business man and keeps my head out of the clouds, but many a time I've wanted to duck these years of apprenticeship and produce the things I believe in. I will some day, but that is another story. Robert has vision. His sense of land and theater values is unfailing. He—"

"Well, so is your vision just as unfailing in your work. The chain didn't even begin to form before you took over the booking end."

"He has fine traits, too. Big ones. His word is his bond. He has business foresight and integrity, but somehow it is his little meannesses. I remember once in my father's house he took a thrashing for something outrageous he was not guilty of, because he had promised some youngster across the way he would shield him, come what might, and somehow I thought it pretty fine of him. But another time he let me take a thrashing for something he had done and stood by without opening his mouth. It is those indescribable smallnesses in his make-up. Once when I was in favor of branching out and producing a legitimate three-act play which I happened to run across—a rare thing from the French—he—well, I won't go into it—but this thing—to-night—that bauble of my mother's—it—it's the climax of a lifetime of such flea bites—a trifle hardly worth the mentioning, and yet—it's the most utter—the most damnable—"

There was a half crash of his clenched hand among the silver and a rise of suffusing red up out of the white of his soft collar.

"I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to let you in for any more of it. I'm sorry. And after you were gracious enough to come alone, too. Come, here is to making this little party a gay one."

He held up his glass. "Here's to the shining child."

"Oh!" she cried, and drank quickly.

"Like it?"

"Not much. It burns."

"You should see your eyes."

"You should see hers."

"Whose?"

"My child's."

"Do you know what I should have done in your husband's place?"

"What?"

"Harnessed you, too, but to a moonbeam."

"I once knew a man to whom I never spoke ten words in all my life, and yet I always imagined he might have talked to me like that—not literally—not in terms of tin dippers."

"Of what, you queer, queer girl?"

"Now I know of whom you remind me! An old school-teacher I once had.
Odd."

"I would never have let you slip my harness through."

"And have deprived the Amusement Enterprise Company of my austere services!"

"You've been invaluable. Ninety per cent of your judgments have been ninety-nine per cent there!"

"Luck."

"Luck nonsense! Judgment isn't horseshoe-shaped."

"I love it! Feeling the public pulse for what it wants. The psychology of your vaudeville audience is as elementary as a primer and as intricate as life. It is a bloodhound when it comes to detecting the false from the true. Take that little sketch, 'Trapped,' you sent me out to see last week. A more sophisticated audience might have mistaken its brittle epigrammatic quality for brilliancy and its flippancy for cleverness. But not your ten-twenty-thirty's. In real life a husband doesn't psychanalyze his wife's lover. He horsewhips him. And that lovely blank-verse fantasy that you attempted on your own. That is the sort of thing you are going to stand for some day in the theater. I loved your wanting it. But right now, while you are on your way up to the goal, is where I come in. Sort of mediator between your ideals and the box office. Of course you loved the fantasy. So did I, and I loved your wanting to do it. But it took vaudeville just one performance to decide that it wasn't ready for that kind of mysticism."

"And you forty minutes."

"You would never have backed it even over my O.K."

"Then you don't realize how far your O.K. goes with me."

"What is this," she smiled, "a mutual-admiration fÊte?"

"I don't know," suddenly leaning toward her, reddening. "I can only speak for myself. Lilly—you're wonderful—"

She chose to be casual, most effectively, too.

"Indeed it is mutual. I need hardly to tell you what association with your office has meant to me. The romance of an organization like yours. The thrill of seeing it triple proportions in these few years. The fine stimulating something that comes with the acquisition of each new Amusement Enterprise Theater. The chats we have had over plays, play writing, producing. Your own fine aim. Oh, it has made bearable even the monotony of the secretarial end of it!"

"I am afraid your secretarial services are about to be dispensed with."

She placed a quick hand to her heart.

"What do you mean?"

He flecked his cigar, laughing over at her.

"You're delicious. What could I mean except that you have outgrown your job?"

"You—mean—"

"I mean that I am going to officially place you in charge of the booking department at—well, your own idea of salary."

"I—I don't know what to say."

"Don't say anything."

"You can't know—"

"I do know."

"You see, she is almost four now, and beautifully cared for, but, now that her little mind is beginning to unfold—I—Oh, to be able to afford a place of my own—next year—when she has outgrown Mrs. Dupree's. You see, I've never really had her. I've such plans for the day when I can have her rearing all to myself. I want life to unfold so naturally to her. Like a flower. That's why I am so terribly jealous of every day we spend apart. That's why you—you cannot know what it means to have you tell me that I've made good. It means that the time is nearing for me to have her with me, to—to—Well, you cannot—cannot know!"

She sat back, feeling foolish because her eyes were filling and trying to smile back the tears.

He reached over to place his palms over her hand.

"How rightly named you are! 'Lilly.' One of those big, milky-spathed, calla lilies. Calla Lilly."

"We'll be going now," she said, feeling for her jacket.

They rode down to Eleventh Street in a cab, almost silently, and as she sat looking out, unsmiling, she could feel his gaze burn her profile.

He left her at the stoop, standing bareheaded.

"You've saved me from an evening of horrors."

"I'm glad."

"You're not angry—Calla Lilly?"

"Of course not."

"How soon again?"

"No."

"Yes, yes!"

"No."

And somehow the word was like a plummet deep into the years ahead.