Six hours later there was a reply folded in Lilly's purse:

We leave to-day for Washington. Arrive New York next Sunday 2.03 via
Pennsylvania. Albert Penny.

An incredible state of calm set in. She had the sensation of each intervening day a shelf of terrace down which she was walking into a deepening sea. Dreams ill-flavored as Orestes' filled her nights, and how tired she was must have sopped into her pillow, but her capacity for the present lessened her dread and made more bearable the fluent and fateful passing of the time.

There were the details of the poor little funeral to be arranged. Lilly, who had never known death, was suddenly face to face with it again, at a time, too, when the incipient beginnings of pandemic that was later to scourge the country was reaping its first harvest; a strange malady carried on the stinking winds of war, shooting up in spouty little flames, that, no sooner laid, found new dry rot to feed upon. Spanish influenza, it was called, for no more visible reason than that it probably had its beginnings in Germany or India.

On the Wednesday of Mrs. Schum's funeral five of the Amusement Enterprise office force were home with it, one little telephone operator, who occasionally laid the surreptitious offering of an orange or a carnation on Lilly's desk, succumbing.

It was amazing how light the imprint of Harry and his grandmother. Of effects there were practically none. A few tired-looking old dresses of Mrs. Schum's. Eleven dollars and some odd change in a tin box behind a clock. Harry's pinch-back suit with the slanting pockets. A daguerreotype or two. The inevitable stack of modest enough but unpaid bills. Odds. Ends. And in a wooden soap box shoved beneath Harry's cot, old door bells, faucets, bits of pipe, glass door knobs, and, laid reverently apart, a stack of Lilly's discarded gloves, placed to simulate the print of the hand.

For days, Zoe, who had taken the tired willingness of Mrs. Schum so for granted, cried herself bitterly into a state that threatened to take the form of a fever, and then to the strophe and antistrophe of her young grief, becoming self-conscious, burst, with not particularly precocious rhyme, reason, or meter, into the following, which was printed in her school paper:

"Teach me to live, O God,
If sorrow be to live,
Then let me know
All pain that it can give."

"Teach me to live, O God,
To know the gold from dross,
To live, dear God, to live.
I care not what it cost."

And Lilly, the dear mother dust in her eyes, had the page framed beneath a faded photograph of Mrs. Schum, taken when her lips and breast were young.

To attune Zoe to the coming of her family was no small matter. She was outrageously rebellious, flagrantly irreverent, and for every outburst Lilly bled her sense of blame.

"You've made a farce of everything, Lilly. You've fought for a principle and, with it won, turned maudlin. What is the idea? To drag me back there to join the sewing circle and the local society for the prevention of spinsterhood to maidens?"

"You are not funny at all. You know you are clear of that kind of thing. You're like an arrow on its way to its goal. Straight and sure. Nothing can deflect you. That's why I dared."

"Well, then?"

"Realizations can come, Zoe, even to a selfishness as great as mine has been."

"Sacrifice is not always beautiful. It can be silly and futile."

"Zoe!"

"Yes, and bring rewards to neither side. Half the people who are sacrificed for become tearful tyrants, and those who do the sacrificing sour and meek, or holy with righteousness."

"You are reciting the kind of thing you hear down at Daab's."

"I'm reciting you."

"You darling boomerang!"

"I suppose now you are sorry you didn't stay at home in your canary cage to no one's particular advantage and your own terrific disadvantage. Now that you have reared me into the kind of human being you set out to be, you renig. Do you want to throw me back into that bowl with the greased sides that you managed to climb out of? Not much."

This from Zoe, mixed metaphor and all, who at seventeen kept Doll's House, Freud, Anna Karenina, and Ellen Key on the table beside her bed.

"Theories go down, Zoe, before life—and death."

She sat haughtily young, and without tolerance, her profile averted and trying to keep the quiver off her lips.

"Just when I'm ready to graduate and preparing for my audition—to have this—"

"Zoe—Zoe—don't make it harder—"

"I'm a dog, Lilly—forgive me."

"The entire abominable condition is my fault—"

"Then thank God for the abominable condition. I love you and everything you've done."

"Then be sweet to them for my sake. Your grandmother, she's going to be unlike anyone you have ever known. She's a great one to pick up the bread crumbs of life with a great ado. That's been her existence, dear—little things. And your grandfather, Zoe, he's so gentle. Somehow I imagine he is even gentler now. You remember I used to tell you how we'd play at hide and seek long after I was grown. Oh, Zoe, be sweet!"

"I will, dear."

"And—your father. Whatever his attitude may be, remember the fault lies in me—not him."

"Trust me, Lilly, if only he doesn't drop dead when he sees me!"

"Zoe!"

Between them the little drama was carefully rehearsed.

"Visi would pay big money for this act."

"You'll be your own natural sweet self, Zoe? No posing?"

"Don't worry. I suppose if the truth is known I'll have an aggravated case of stage fright."

"They'll know—everything, Zoe, before I let them see you. Just be simple, dear—and please—no dramatics!"

"It's all too dramatic for dramatics," she replied, cryptically.

It was finally decided that Lilly was to meet the train alone, settle the trio at the Hotel Astor, and arrive at the apartment in time for a dinner prepared by a cook and waitress especially brought in for the day.

"Break the news in a public place, Lilly—the hotel lobby or a taxi—-and avoid family fireworks."

"My news can't be broken."

"Why?"

"Smashed, rather."

At four o'clock the morning of the arrival, Lilly was up, moving with the aimlessness of great nervousness about the apartment. At that same hour Mrs. Becker was emerging backward from her sleeper, kimono-clad, and bulging through the curtains into the dark aisle.

"Carrie," her husband whispered after her, jutting his head out with a turtle's dart, "it's only three o'clock, Eastern time. Why are you getting up?"

"Because I want to," she said, plowing on.

Once in the dressing room, she fell to crying as she staggered and dressed, apparently because each object, as she took it up, fell from her fingers.

And yet the meeting occurred, as dreaded and anticipated moments often do, damply, and as a heavily loaded bomb, for one reason or another, can go off with a cat cough.

To the observer, what happened that early afternoon was simply a very trim and very tailored young woman, her boyishness of attire somewhat accentuated because her swift clean-cutness was so obviously its inspiration, greeting, in the marble vastness of Grand Central Terminal, a trio of what was plainly a pair of travel-stained parents and perhaps an uncle.

Standing there peering between the grillwork as the train slid in through the greasy gloom, watching the run of "red caps" and the slow disgorging of passengers, Lilly saw it all in waves of movement, waves of heat, waves of gaseous unreality.

Then she spied them. Her mother in the old, familiar vanguard, her father with that bulge to his back from which the gray coat hung loosely, Albert struggling to save his luggage from the fiery piracy of a "red cap."

Her first sense was of fatness, their incredible, caravaning, lumbaginous fatness! There was a new chin to her mother. Gone was the old pulled-in waistline, but the old love of finery was out on her hat in ostrich plumes, a boa of marabou lending further elegance. And her father! He was somehow behind himself, slanting out from neck to quite a bulge of abdomen, then receding again to legs that caught her throat with a sense of their being too thin to sustain him. The fringe of hair that showed beneath his slouch hat was quite white, too, and with that same clutch at her throat she saw that it was thin as a baby's can be thin.

It is doubtful if she would have known Penny. He was himself in sebaceous italics. The old stolidity of stature was there, but hardly the solidity. Like Mrs. Becker, he had chubbied up, so to speak, until he looked shorter. And Albert was bald. It showed out under the rear of his derby, like a well-scrubbed visage awaiting some deft hand to sketch in the features, as poor Harry had done it to the clothespins. His Scandinavian blondness was quite gone; there was just a fringe of tan hair left and his jowls hung a bit, of skin not quite filled with flesh.

All this in a telegraphic flash as she stood there waiting, and at the sight of her father, on his too thin legs, dragging his cane slightly so that it scraped, and in the other hand a sagging old black valise that she remembered, all the tightness at her throat relaxed suddenly, the tears coming so easily that she could smile through them.

The dragging of that cane, it hurt her poignantly, as little vagrant memories can.

They spied her out even as she spied them, and, bodybeat to bodybeat, she and her mother met, shaking to silent sobs and twisting hearts. Then her father, pressing the coldly smelling mustache to her lips and lifting her in the old way by the armpits, so that the instant closed over her like a swoon.

With Albert it was strangely easier; there was a pause as wide as a hair while he stood there blinking, and weighted with his unsurrendered luggage.

"Albert," she said, finding the word at last.

At that moment, a "red cap," wild for fee, made for one of the brand-new leather cases.

"Let go," he cried, in small anger. "That is a six-dollar-and-ninety-eight-cent bag you are jerking."

Then he brought his gaze back to Lilly, his Adam's apple above the gray necktie throbbing so that it seemed to her his entire body must reverberate to the pistonlike process.

"Well," he said. "Well, well," the words dropping down into the dry well of a gulp.

But somehow after the episode of the luggage, everything was easier, for
Lilly at least. She could smile now.

Very presently they were actually in a taxicab together, the talk of the moment echoing against the silence of unspoken words taking shape between them.

"Papa!" she said, finally, from the little folding seat opposite him, stroking his hands and steadying herself with them against the throw of the cab. "Oh, papa, papa!"

He smiled back through crinkles that were new to her, patting her in turn and looking off.

Mrs. Becker fell to crying, pressing her handkerchief up against her eyes and trying to lift her veil above the tears.

"After all these years," she kept repeating. "Years. Years."

"Now, now, Carrie—you promised."

"What hotel?" asked Penny, one of the bags across his knees and one weather eye for the other on the driver's seat.

"The Astor; that is one of the best. I've your rooms all arranged for.
My—my place is too small."

"A less expensive would do, wouldn't it, mother?" addressing himself, without once meeting Lilly's eye, to his mother-in-law.

"You're my guests," she said, trying to smile down old aversions. "This is my party."

"Years—" sobbed Mrs. Becker. "She looks the same, but I'm a stranger to my own child. Ben, we're strangers."

They were all suddenly in tears, Mr. Becker laying a clumsy hand to his wife's arm.

"Carrie, you promised—"

"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 God—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 rehearsed 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 nobody 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 God! 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 God'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. Glass 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—"

"Close it all the way, Albert, you're still in a draught."

Suddenly Lilly sat back, silent holding her father's hand the rest of the way.

But no sooner were the three of them safely into the little front room than, without even seating them, she rushed out to forestall Zoe.

But too late. That young lady herself had already appeared between the curtains of the alcove. She had done the outlandish, the outrageous, the irrelevant thing.

An old red rep portiÈre wound tightly around her body to below the armpits, and held there by skillfully adjusted bands of black velvet, a fillet of the same so low that it touched her eyebrows secured about her boxed and brilliantly blond hair, she held the half-profile pose of a Carmencita, a pair of ten-cent-store black earrings dangling and her upflung gesture one of defiance, mischief with an unmistakable dash of irrepressible dramatics.

In a silence that shaped itself to a grin, Lilly, caught midstep as it were, stood regarding her daughter. She wanted to scream, to throw back her head and shout her hysteria, to spank her daughter bodily there across her knees, and more than that she wanted to laugh! Enormous laughter, to allay her sense of madness.

Instead she found voice, which, when it came, was not her own, for thinness.

"Albert," she said, "this is your daughter—Zoe."

"Ben," whispered Mrs. Becker, out of a fantastic cave of silence and rising suddenly from her chair to plant herself on the overstuffed divan, where there was more horizontal room—"Ben, I think I'm going to faint."

And she did.