Her own hands were very cold, her cheeks very pink. She had a pressing behind the eyes of a not-to-be-endured impulse of wanting to cry. His reading of her name was a hot javelin through the pit of her being.
After the exercises and as school was in dismissal she saw him hurrying out of a side door with a tennis racket. It seemed suddenly intolerable that walk home through Vandaventer Place to her boarding-house world.
Flora's perceptions were small and quick.
"Why, Lilly, your cheeks are as red as anything and you're getting a fever blister. Somebody kissed you!"
Her hand flew to her mouth almost guiltily, as if to the feel of lips slightly protuberant.
"Why—Oh, you horrid girl!"
"It was Lind! Lind!"
"Lind—what—who?"
"Lindsley, of course," dipping with laughter.
"Flora Kemble, I'll never speak to you again. You're stuck on him yourself and trying to put it on to me."
"Me stuck on him, the way his teeth stick out! No poor school-teacher for mine!"
"You're boy-crazy. I'm not."
But that night for the first time in her life Lilly lay through a sleepless hour, staring up into the darkness. The blanket irked her and she plunged it off, burrowing one cheek and then the other into her pillow in search of cool spots. Her mother puffed out slowly into the silence, her father a bit more sonorous and full of rumblings.
Lilly felt herself wound up tightly and needing to be run down. She was taut as a spring. After a while she took to plucking out from the darkness words of sedative quality.
"Dove," she repeated softly to herself, and very, very slowly. "Dove.Beautiful, quiet dove. Saint. Cathedral. Peace. Dell."
But when she finally did drop off to sleep a smile of protuberant teeth was out like a rainbow across her darkness.
Latitudinally speaking, there are about two kinds of Americans—those who live west of Syracuse, and those who do not. An imaginary line separates the tropic of candescence, fast trains, naval reviews, broad a's, Broadway, Beacon Street, Independence Square, and Tammany Hall from the cancer of craps, silver dollars, lynchings, alfalfa, toothpicks, detachable cuffs, napkin rings, and boll weevils.
It is more than probable that Horace Lindsley's and Lilly Becker's lineage were loamy with about the same magnesia of the soil. Generations of each of them had tilled into the more or less contiguous dirt of Teutonic Europe.
Lilly's progenitors had bartered in low Dutch; Horace Lindsley's in highGerman, which, after all, is more a matter of geography than altitudes.
An oval daguerreotype of a great-grandmother at the harpsichord had hung in Carrie Becker's (néePloag) home in Granite City.
A Lindsley had once presented an emperor with a hand-illuminated version of the King James Bible, wrought out of peasant patience. Horace Lindsley's mother belonged to a New England suffrage society when ladies still wore silk mitts, and had dared to open a private kindergarten in her back parlor after marriage.
It was this tincture of culture running like a light bluing through Lindsley's heritage that began to set in motion the little sleeping molecules of Lilly's class consciousness.
"Middle class," came to be a term employed always with lips that curled. There were, then, actually men creatures outside the English "Fireside Novels" she was allowed to devour without interruption by parents to whom books were largely objects with which a room was cluttered up, who wore spats, did play tennis in white flannels, turned down the page at a favorite passage of poetry, eschewed suspenders for belts, were guiltless of sleeve garters, and attended Saturday-afternoon symphony concerts, in Lindsley's case, almost a lone male, debonaire and unabashed in a garden of women.
At Lilly's urgent instance she and her mother often attended these subscription concerts, seats for single performances obtainable (in a commendable zeal to promote local music) in exchange for a newspaper coupon and twenty-five cents.
Mrs. Becker frankly yawned through them, nictitating, as it were, during the long narrative passages of the symphony or occupied with the personnel of the audience.
"Look, Lilly," whispering behind her unopened program, "that's a pretty idea over there on that red-haired girl. See the way the baby ribbon is run through the sleeves. Do you want a dress like that?"
"Sh-h-h-h, mamma! No; it's too fussy!"
"Why don't they play something with a tune to it? I wouldn't give a row of pins for music without any air at all."
"Sh-h-h-h, mamma. There isn't much tune to classical music."
"I wish the first violinist would play a solo. 'Warum,' like last time.I've some baby ribbon just like that, Lilly. I picked it up on sale inGentle's basement bins—"
"Mamma, don't stare so."
"Don't criticize everything I do."
At one of these concerts Lilly shot out her hand suddenly, closing it over her mother's wrist.
"Mamma, there's Lindsley. See, down there in the fourth row."
"Who?"
"My English teacher. See, polishing his eyeglasses."
Mrs. Becker sat straight, chin out like an antenna.
"Is that him?"
"Yes, that's he."
"I don't see anything so wonderful about him. He needs a haircut."
"Oh, mamma, you think all men have to wear their hair short and ugly like papa and Uncle Buck. In the East men look like that."
"The idea! A man calls himself a man coming to a matinée like this. Your papa ought to know that you have a sissy like him on your mind. Such a looking thing! Ugh!"
These recurring intimations could sting Lilly almost to tears.
"Oh, mamma, that's just the—the meanest thing to say. Can't I show you my English teacher without having him on my mind?"
"I never could stand a man whose teeth stick out. He looks like a horse."
"Papa's teeth stick out."
"Yes, but just one, and his mustache hides that. I only hope for you,Lilly, that some day you get a man as good as your father."
"How did papa propose to you, mamma? What did he say?"
Even Mrs. Becker could flush, quite prettily, too, her lids dropping at this not infrequent query of Lilly's.
"It's not nice for young girls to ask such questions."
"Go on, mamma, what did he say?"
"I don't remember."
The overture broke in upon them then, a brilliantly noisy one fromTschaikowsky that bathed them in a vichy of excited surf.
Settling with her head snuggled against her fur tippet, the back of her neck against the chair top, Lilly could feel herself recede, as it were, into a sort of anagogical half consciousness, laved and carried along on currents of melody that were as sensually delicious as a warm bath. Her awareness of Lindsley on a diagonal from her so that she could see his profile hook into the music-scented dimness, ran under her skin like a quick shimmer.
The proscenium arch curved again into her consciousness, herself its center and vocal beyond the powers of the human organ.
The slamming up of chairs and mussy shuffling into wraps recalled her. It was indescribably sad, this swimming up to reality. The buttoning of her little tippet. The smell of damp umbrellas. Then the jamming down the aisle toward the late and rainy afternoon. At the door they were suddenly crushed up against Horace Lindsley, his coat collar turned up about his ears.
"Miss Becker," he said, by way of greeting, nodding and showing his teeth.
Her heart became a little elevator dropping in sheer descent.
"Oh—how—do—you—do?" They were pushed shoulder to shoulder, and, toLilly's agony, her mother's voice lifted itself in loud concern.
"For pity's sake, look at that downpour, will you? I hope your father has the good sense to wear his rubbers. Ouch! Don't knock me down, please."
"Mamma—please. Mr. Lindsley, I want you to meet my mother."
"Pleased to meet you. Lilly certainly has talked of her English teacher a lot."
"She is a very interesting little student, Mrs. Becker. Quite a quality to her work."
"Well, I am certainly pleased to hear that. She's our only one, you know."
"Lilly has a tendency to let her imagination run away with her. A good fault if she controls it."
"That's what her father and I always tell her. The child has too many talents to settle down to any one. She gets her music from my side of the house, but she quits practicing to write and she quits writing to practice. It's not that we want our little girl ever to make her own living, but her father and I believe in a girl being prepared, even if she never has to use it. That's why we are having her take the commercial course. We don't pretend to be swells, but at least we plan to do as well for our child as the next."
"Exactly."
LILLY (in her agony): "Come, mamma."
"I wish you could read the poem she wrote last night, Mr. Lindsley. Not that I give a row of pins for poetry, as a rule, but I told her she ought to take this one to school."
"Please, mamma, please!"
"If I do say it myself, it was grand. Mr. Hazzard, quite an educated gentleman who boards where we do, thought so, too. Lilly, why don't you show Mr. Lindsley that poem? He's authority."
"Mamma, if only you won't talk about it."
"You must bring it to class, Miss Becker."
"No, no! I've—I've torn it up."
"I don't remember all of it, but everybody considered it a grand thought for such a young girl; it goes—"
"Mamma! Mamma—not here—now!"
"I would not have the restless soulThat sees not beauty everywhere.I see it glint on ocean waves,Dance through a youth's or maiden's hair."
"Mamma, they're pushing so! Good night, Mr. Lindsley. Mamma, come!"
Outside in the wet dusk they boarded an electric car, Lilly and her mother crammed on a rear platform of the wet overcoats, leaking umbrellas, and wet-smelling mackintoshes of dinner-bound St. Louis.
"He's a right nice young man, intelligent—but if ever a person looked like a horse! You see, he agrees with your papa and me. You don't apply yourself to any one thing."
Lilly turned her inflamed, quivering face upon her mother, trying to speak through a violent aching of tonsils.
"Oh," she cried, "how could you? I'll never look him in the face again!Oh—oh—how could you?"
"Are you crazy? How could I what?"
"The poem. The—the glint in—his hair. He'll think it was his hair I meant. Oh! Oh!"
The ready ire which could flame up in Mrs. Becker leaped out then.
"If you are ashamed of your mother, maybe you had better not be seen out with her again. All I am good for is to stint and manage to get you pretty clothes."
"No, n-no, mamma, I didn't mean that, dear."
"For a horse-face like him I won't be made little."
"Sh-h-h-h, dear! The whole street car doesn't need to hear."
"I wouldn't give a row of pins for ten like him."
"Mamma, the way you—talked."
"The way I talked, what? I suppose hereafter when I go out with my educated daughter I will have to wear a muzzle."
"I—Oh, it wasn't what you said, mamma; it was—the way you said it."
"The way I said it? That's a rich one. If I don't tell your father! My own child is ashamed of her mother. Well, let me tell you I—"
"No, mamma, you don't understand. Take that word 'swells,' for instance. Oh, I know I've used it myself, but all of a sudden, to-day, it—it sounded so ordinary."
"For a hundred-dollar-a-month school-teacher that your papa has to pay taxes to support, I'm not afraid of my p's and q's."
"And, mamma," suddenly and acutely sensitive to pleonasm, "you begin every sentence with 'say' and you say 'certainly' so often."
"If I don't have a talk with your father when he comes home this night! That's the thanks I get for sitting through a concert with you when I might have been enjoying myself at my euchre club. Just get those high-tone notions out of your head. We're simple people, not swells. You're a changed child these days."
It was true. An ineffable ache, a darting neuralgia of spirit, too cunning and quick for diagnosis, was shooting through Lilly her last two years at High School.
That Horace Lindsley, who was hardly to indent her life and whose interest in the clean-eyed girl was little more than a leaf upon his consciousness, and whose feet were already feeling the tug of the quicksands of mediocrity which were to suck him out of her reckoning, should have been the innocent source of this neurosis, is hardly remarkable.
Lilly, with the mysterious tenacity of a crannied flower, was pulling from her soil toward the light. And light in all its chiaroscuras rules these leve, couche, complexion, and humors of the world. Lindsley was a ray.
And so her adolescence came in suddenly, almost stormlike, uprooting little forests of sapling traditions.
At sixteen she still slept on the cot drawn across the bed end and rode her bicycle up and down the sidewalks, holding her skirts down against the wind, but also she had ransacked the boarding-house shelves and High School library, reading her uncensored way throughLady Audrey's Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Les Misérables, Stories of the Operas, and a red volume rescued from propping up the hall hatrack,Great Lovers.
Within that same year Katy Stutz twice lowered her skirt hems.
"Mamma, I think it is terrible I haven't a room to myself."
The entire surface of Mrs. Becker seemed to coat over with sensitiveness to this frequently discussed issue.
"Why," her lips writhing with an excoriating brand of self-pity, "who amI that I should want a home for my daughter, now that she is grown? Mr.Kemble can treat his wife like a queen, but me—why, I'm mud under myhusband's feet."
The Kemble family, on a wave of putative prosperity, had eight months since gone to housekeeping in a rather pretentious rock-fronted house on one of the many newly graded streets west of Kingshighway. Every Friday night Lilly slept with Flora, the two side by side in Flora's pretty new bird's-eye-maple bed, exchanging unextinguishable confidences well through nights wakeful with their dreams.
"Flora has her own parlor to practice in, and here I can't even sing a little without the entire boarding house rapping on the wall."
"It's a shame. Watch me talk to your father to-night."
"Mamma, can't I please take elocution?"
"I should say not. Aren't piano and voice sufficient? The idea! I wouldn't give a row of pins for all the elocution in the world. Reciting is out of date."
"Mamma, it isn't. Mr. Lindsley says the modern woman of culture should cultivate her speaking voice the same as she learns to use her singing voice. Please, mamma; only a dollar a lesson."
"Oh, I don't care! Goodness knows where the money is coming from, with flax twine where it is; but anything for peace."
And so when Lilly graduated from High School, third in her class, and again slightly to the rear of Estelle Foote, who read the valedictory, she was executing excitedly, if sloppily, "The Turkish Patrol," was singing in an abominably trained but elastic enough soprano, the "Jewel Song" from "Faust," and "Jocelyn," a lullaby, and at a private recital of the Alden School of Dramatic Expression had recited "A Set of Turquoise" to incidental music.
Mrs. Schum's boarding house, to the man, turned out to Lilly's High School graduation, Katy Stutz and Willie standing in the wings and all unwittingly visible from the house. A German-silver manicure set, handsomely embossed, bore the somewhat cryptic card, "To Lilly Becker, as she stands on the threshold of life, from her friends in the house." There were a Honiton-lace fan with mother-of-pearl sticks, with the best wishes of her mother's euchre club, and from her parents a tiny diamond ring set high in gold facets, "To Lilly, from her parents, June, 1901," engraved in the hoop.
That night, still in her white organdie frock, with its whirligig design of too much Valenciennes lace, her hair worn high and revealing an unsuspectedly white nape of neck, Lilly regarded her parents across a little table-display of gifts.
"I feel so queer," she said, looking off through the chocolate-ochre wall paper, the reaction already set in. "So sort of—finished. Nothing to do."
MR. BECKER: "That was certainly a fine speech the president of the Board of Education made. You've something now that no one can take away from you. Knowledge is power."
"Two girls in our class are going to the University of Missouri, papa.That's what I'd like to do—go to college."
"Don't spoil a good thing by trying to overdo it, Lilly. It is as bad for a young girl to permit herself to be educated into one of those bold, unwomanly woman's-rights girls as it is for her to be frivolous and empty-headed. When women get too smart they get unattractive."
"But, papa, girls are beginning more and more to go to college, and all women will be—suffrage—some day."
"Not womanly girls, Lilly."
"I always said that High School would be her ruination."
"I didn't learn it there, mamma. I always wanted to be something—"
"Well, you're a finished stenographer, aren't you? Why not go down to your father's office a couple of mornings a week?"
"I don't mean stenography. I hated learning it. I mean something—something—beyond—"
Suddenly Mrs. Becker, quiet at the business of wrapping away some of the gifts, glanced up, two round spots of color on her cheeks.
"Youaregoing to do something, Lilly. Have a home and entertain in it like other girls."
"But—"
"I've a piece of news for you and your father. If I waited for him to take the initiative I'd wait until the crack of doom."
"What is it, little woman?"
"I signed a lease yesterday for one of those yellow-brick houses—seven rooms, bath, furnace heat, and privilege of buying. Twenty-eight dollars, out on Page Avenue near Union. We move in two weeks from to-day."
There followed one of those years which come and go even in the small affairs of small men, when for Ben Becker swift waters flowed under the bridge. He was just that, a small man, prided himself upon it and was frequent in his boast: "I'm a small man, Carrie. I don't hope to make a big or showy success of it. Just a comfortable and unassuming living is about all I expect to get out of it, and that's a pretty good deal."
The Spanish-American War, something of musical comedy in its setting, had run its brief malarial engagement, netting Ben Becker, in one order of hemp rope alone, a cleanly realized profit of forty-two hundred dollars.
On a new and gradually attained bank credit the B. T. Becker Hemp, Rope, and Twine Company bought out the about-to-be-insolvent Mound City Flax Twine Company, the consolidated interests moving into a two-story brick building on South Seventh Street.
The firm took on the subtle and psychological proportions that go with incorporation, however unassuming, capitalizing at fifteen thousand dollars, B. T. Becker, president; Jerry Hensel, trusted foreman of years, vice president and holder of ten shares; Carrie Becker, secretary and treasurer and, to propitiate the law, holder of one share.
The little house on Page Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none the less—-and with the flexible personality of houses—taking on the print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's euchre friends, arriving from Grand Rapids two months late, completed a careful and thrifty period of housefurnishing. There were an upright piano, still rented, but, like the house, payments to apply to a possible future purchase, in the square of "reception hall"; a double brass bedstead in the second-story front; and tucked away in the back of the tiny house, overlooking, through sheerest of dimity curtains, a rolling ocean of empty lots, the German-silver manicure set spread out on the dressing table, Lilly's bird's-eye-maple bedroom come true.
Followed even then a long and uneasy period of adjustment. The up and down stairs tugged at the rear muscles of Mrs. Becker's legs, compelling evening foot baths. Mr. Becker chafed under the twenty minutes additional street-car ride, eating his dinner by gaslight even in August. The bed making and her allotment of the upstairs work irked Lilly, even though Willie's stepniece, Georgia, came to help out once a week, and evenings the little house could seem very still and untenanted.
But after the arrival of the mahogany-and-velours parlor set, the music cabinet, and the hanging of crispy lace curtains, Lilly standing on the ladder, her mother steadying from below, and finally the laying of a well-padded strip of stair carpet to eat in the hollow noises of new tenancy, the house began to settle, so to speak.
Something latent, something congenital, even malignant, however, had developed in Mrs. Becker. She took a fierce kind of joy, not untinged with the mongrel emotion of self-pity, in scrubbing, on hands and knees, the entire flight of back stairs at the black six-o'clock hour of wintry mornings, her voice tickling up like a feather duster to Lilly's reluctantly awakening senses.
"Lil-ly! Get up! I've done a day's work already. If I was a girl I wouldn't want to sleep while my mother slaves."
But let Lilly so much as venture down into the wintry gaslight of the bacon-fragrant kitchen, proffering her drowsy aid, a new flow, still in the key of termagency, would greet her.
"Go right back to bed, Lilly. You want to catch your death of cold?"
"But, mamma, you fuss so. I'd rather help than listen. Here, let me stir the oatmeal."
"Go back to bed, I say. I don't intend to have you spoil your hands with kitchen work. Maybe some day your father will feel in a position to give his wife a permanent servant girl like any other woman has."
"Mamma, he's always begging you to get one,"
"I know. Talk is cheap. Did you hear what I said, Lilly? Stop that stirring and go back to bed! I'll bring up your breakfast after a while. I'll fix your sandwiches for the sewing circle this afternoon."
"Oh, mamma, I just hate that circle! I wish to goodness you would let me resign."
"I have a grateful daughter, I have. Any other child with your advantages would think she had heaven on earth."
"I hate it, I tell you. Flora and Snow and all those girls, with nothing on their brains except fellows and fancy work, make me positively sick."
"I notice Flora had enough brains to become engaged to a fine young fellow with prospects like Vincent Bankhead."
"Every time I sit down at that circle I think I'm going to scream. I just can't rake up enthusiasm over French knots. Something in me begins to suffocate and I can't get out from under. I hate it."
Regarding her daughter through the bluish aroma of bacon in the frying, her early-morning coiffure and wrapper not lenient with her, a bitterness pulled at the lips of Mrs. Becker.
"That settles it. I'm going to have a talk with your father this morning."
"Oh, mamma, please don't begin a scene!"
"Ben, are you ready for breakfast? Come down. What do you do up there so long? You've been one solid hour splashing around the bathroom, as if I didn't have to get down on my hands and knees to wipe up the flood around the bathtub. Hurry! Your daughter has something to say to you."
"Coming, Carrie. Don't get excited."
"Don't get excited! I think your father would ram that down my throat if this house was tumbling around our heads."
It was true that Mr. Becker's imperturbability incased him like a kindly coating of tallow. His daily and peremptory call to breakfast brought him down only after the last satisfactory application of whisk, tooth, hand, shoe, bath, and hair brush, his invariable white-linen string tie adjusted to a nicety, his neat gray business suit buttoned over a gradual embonpoint.
"If I took as good care of myself as my husband does, I'd live to be a thousand."
"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed to-day."
On this particular morning he descended genial, rubbing cold, soap-exuding hands together.
"Well, little woman! Good morning, daughter."
"Ben, I'm at my row's end with Lilly. Something has got to be done or I can't stand it."
He sat down, an immediate tiredness out in his face, adjusting his napkin by the patent fasteners to each coat lapel.
"Now, Carrie, have you and Lilly been quarreling again? Doesn't it seem too bad, Lilly, that you and your mother cannot get on without these disturbances? Your mother may have her peculiarities, but she means well."
A ready wave of red self-commiseration dashed itself across Mrs.Becker's face.
"I can't stand it, Ben. I don't know what she wants. Maybe you can please her. I can't. Everything I do is wrong. Everything."
In her little blue-gingham morning dress, out of which her neck flowered white and ever beautiful of nape, Lilly crumbled up her biscuit, eyes miserably down, the red-hot pricklings which invariably accompanied these scenes flashing over her and a crowding in her throat as if she must tear it open for language to make them understand.
"Talk to your father, now! Tell him some of the things you hound me with."
"Lilly, what seems to be the trouble?"
"I—I don't know. Mamma gets so excited right away. I just happened to mention that—I don't know what to do with myself."
"Do with yourself! Help me in the house. I can give you enough to do with yourself. I don't get lonesome."
"Carrie, now, don't holler."
"That's the way she is, papa. She gets excited and hollers at me because I can't get interested in sewing clubs and housework."
"It's because you've got it too good that you're not satisfied. That Flora Kemble, that never has a decent thing to wear, gets engaged to a—"
"Now, Carrie, that's no way to talk."
"Mamma always makes me feel uncomfortable because I'm not married yet."
"Now do you believe what I go through with, Ben?"
"You haven't any faith in me, but—somewhere—destiny, or whatever you want to call it, has a job waiting for me!"
"That's too poetical for me to keep up with. Thank goodness I'm a plain woman who knows her place in life."
"Exactly, mamma. It isn't that I consider myself above Flora's party to-morrow night. It's not my place. I don't belong there. I hate it, I tell you."
"You hear that, Ben? That's the thanks I get. You know the way I've tried to make this little home one a child could be proud of. Take the time that fine young Bryant fellow came to call. Why, that little parlor of ours was fit for a princess. His knuckles didn't suit her! They cracked, she said. I've heard of lots of excuses for not taking to boys, but that beats all. Three girls out of the sewing club already married and Flora engaged to that well-to-do Bankhead boy, and mine holds herself above them all."
"Your mother isn't all wrong, Lilly."
"I've run my legs off for the white organdie so Katy Stutz could make it up for Flora's engagement party to-morrow night. Does she appreciate it? Oh yes, long face is the kind of appreciation I get."
"I'd rather stay home, mamma, and practice my singing or read—anything—"
"You'll singthere. Mrs. Kemble has it all fixed for Flora to call on you just before the refreshments. If you begin to pout about this party, Lilly, I—"
"Oh," cried Lilly, turning her face away to hide the embitterment of lip and still crumbling up her biscuit, "don't worry. I'm going if—if it kills me."
Suddenly Mrs. Becker's face quivered ominously, the impending storm-cloud bursting.
"I wish I was dead. What do I get out of it? Struggle and sacrifice, and all for an ungrateful daughter that isn't happy in her home."
"It isn't that. Just let me be—myself!"
"Then what is yourself? For God's sake tell us what? Anything to end this state of affairs."
"I'm suffocating here. Let me make something out of myself."
"Listen to her, Ben. Make something. Her stories come back from the editors. Her teacher keeps telling me her voice isn't ready yet. Miss Lee says her piano technique is lazy—"
"Then let me travel—college—anything."
"She thinks we're millionaires, Ben."
"Lilly, Lilly! What is the young generation coming to?"
"I wish I was dead. Dead," cried Mrs. Becker, beating at the table until the dishes shivered. Danger lights sprang out in little green signals around about the flanges of her nose. She was mounting to hysteria.
"Lilly, aren't you ashamed to torture your mother like this?" cried Mr. Becker, his voice shot through with what for him amounted to a pistol report. "Comfort your mother. Apologize at once!"
"Mamma, I'm sorry! I am, dear."
"You would think we were plotting against her."
"Now, now, Carrie, Lilly doesn't mean all she says."
"But she eats my life out."
"She wants to please us. Don't you, Lilly?"
"Y-yes, papa—"
"Now let us see if things can't run smoother in our little home, eh,Lilly? We'll all try and do each his part, eh, Lilly?"
"Y-yes, papa."
"It's late," cried Mrs. Becker, suddenly, on the single gong of half after seven, and, ever quick and kaleidoscopic of mood: "Katy Stutz will be here any minute. That's her now. Run upstairs, Lilly, and take the top off the sewing machine and lay out the white organdie. Quick, Lilly. I want you to have it without fail for to-morrow night."
It was at this controversial gathering of young people at the home ofFlora Kemble that Lilly met, for the first time, Albert Penny.
The Kemble home lent itself gracefully to occasions of this kind, the parlor and reception hall opening into one, and the impending refreshments in the dining room shut off with folding doors. There was more of ostentation in the Kemble home. More festooning of fringed scarfs, gilt chairs, and a glass curio cabinet crammed with knickknacks.
"Dutch as sauerkraut," was Mrs. Becker's indictment; and Flora Kemble came under the gaucherie of the impeachment, too.
She had attained tall and exceedingly supine proportions, wore pinks and blues and an invariable necklace of pink paste pearls to fine advantage, and a fuzz of yellow bangs that fell down over her eyes, only to be repeatedly flung back again.
Again MRS. BECKER (who could be caustic): "She makes me so nervous, with her hair down over her eyes like a poodle dog, that I could scream."
Nevertheless, at eighteen Flora's neat spiritous air lay calm as a wimple over her keenly motivated little self. The same apparently guileless exterior that had concealed her struggle along a road lit with midnight oil toward her graduation, enveloped the campaign of strategy and minutiae that had resulted victoriously in her engagement to Vincent Bankhead, assistant credit man to his father.
Albert Penny at this time was second-assistant buyer for Slocum-Hines, and, at the instance of his friend Vincent, somewhat reluctantly present.
"Al, what are you doing to-night?"
"Oh, about the same old thing! Take a stroll and turn in, I guess. Why?"
"There is a little gathering up at the Kembles' this evening. Thought maybe you'd like to meet the girl. Nothing formal, just a few of the girls and boys over to celebrate."
"I'm not much on that kind of thing, Bankhead. Guess you'd better count me out."
"Come along. Want to show you the kind of little peach I've picked."
"Ask me out some night to a quiet little supper, Bankhead. I feel a cold coming on."
"Quiet little supper, nothing. That's your trouble now, too much quiet.Nice people, her folks. It'll do you good."
And so it came that when the folding doors between the Kemble dining room and parlor were thrown open, Lilly Becker, still flushed from a self-accompanied rendition of "Angels' Serenade" and an encore, "Jocelyn," and Albert Penny, in a neat business suit and plaid four-in-hand, found themselves side by side, napkin and dish of ice cream on each of their laps, gay little bubbles of conversation, that were constantly exploding into laughter, floating up from off the gathering.
There is a photograph somewhere in an album of Lilly much as she must have looked that night. Her white organdie frock out charmingly around her, a fluted ruffle at the low neck forming fitting calyx for the fine upward flow of her high white chest into firm, smooth throat; the enormous puff sleeves of the period ending above the elbow where her arm was roundest; the ardent, rather upward thrust of face as if the stars were fragrant; the little lilt to the eyebrows; the straight gray eyes; the complexion smooth as double cream, flowing in cleanest jointure into the shining brown hair, worn in an age of Psyche or Pompadour, so swiftly and shiningly drawn back that it might have been painted there.
That was the Lilly Becker upon whom Albert Penny cast the first second glance he had ever spared her sex.
"Miss Becker, we certainly did enjoy your solo."
She was still warmed from the effort, the tingling nervousness of the moment not yet died down, and she was eager and grateful.
"Oh, Mr. Penny, did you really? I was so afraid I flatted there at the end."
"I had to laugh the way they broke in with clapping before you were finished. I knew you weren't done."
"Oh, then you're musical, too?"
"No, but I could see there was one more page you hadn't turned."
"Oh!"
"My! but you can go high! Like a regular opera singer."
"Oh, if I thought you meant that! It's my ambition to sing—real big opera, you know."
"It certainly was a pretty song, not so much the song as the way you sang it. I could understand every word."
"If only my parents could hear you say that. You see, they don't approve. They think it's all right for a girl to have a parlor voice, but it must stop right there, otherwise it becomes a liability instead of an asset."
At this little conceit of speech he turned delighted eyes upon her.
"Why, you're a regular little business woman!" he cried.
"Yes," she sighed out at him through a smile, "I took the commercial course at High."
Inhibitions induce callosities, and Albert Penny's inhibitions, incased within the shell of himself, were as catalogic as Homer's list of ships. First, like Tithonus, he had no youth. Persiflage, which he secretly envied in others, on his own lips went off like damp fireworks. He loved order and his mind easily took in statistics. He had invented a wire kind of dish for utilizing the left-over blobs of soap. He never received so much as a street-car transfer without reading its entire face contents. In seven years he had not availed himself of the annual two weeks' vacation offered him by his firm, and, conspire as he would against it, Sunday continued to represent to him a hebdomadal vacuity of morning paper, afternoon nap and walk, unsatisfactory cold supper, and early to bed. His very capacity for monotony seemed to engender it. He could sit in Forest Park the whole of a Sunday afternoon, poring over a chance railroad time-table picked up on the bench; paring his straight, clean finger nails with a penknife; observing the carriages go by; or sit beside the lake, watching the skiffs glide about at twenty-five cents the hour; and finally, hat brim down over his eyes, doze until twilight seeped damply into his consciousness.
This same unsensitiveness to routine had enhanced his value with Slocum-Hines from delivery boy at fifteen to second-assistant buyer at twenty-five, an amenability, however, that threatened to pauperize him of any capacity for play. Under the well-meant banterings of friends he became conscious of it, but to cast it off was to cast off the thing he was. He tried to learn to recreate, and took Saturday-evening street-car rides to Forest Park Highlands and joined a bowling club. He paid ten dollars in advance for a course of six dancing lessons, too, and only took four of them.
There had never been a woman, a perfume, or a regret in his life. In the period of ten years since his migration from the paternal farm ten miles outside of Sparta, Missouri, he had worked for one firm, boarded with one landlady, and eaten about three thousand quick lunches in the Old Rock Bakery at Lucas Avenue and Broadway. To further account for the state of existing hiatus in Mr. Penny's scheme of things would be tautology.
A short femur line gave him an entirely false appearance of stockiness. On the contrary, he stood a full five feet ten, was thewed with fine compactness and solid with clean living and clean with solid living. Even the fiber of his remarkably fine hair was strong. It was the brilliant honey color of full-moon shine, lay off his brow, but not down, lending him a look of distinction to which he was hardly entitled.
He regarded Lilly with a furtiveness prompted solely by a desire not to appear audacious. Her softly rising throat just recovering its normal beat reminded him of the sweet agitation of pigeons in the park. He was close enough to be conscious of an amazing impulse on his part to reach over and touch the soft white flesh above the cove of her elbow. A little blue thread of a vein showed there, maddeningly. A sense of inner pounding suffocated him. He felt as if he had suddenly stepped into a bath of charged waters, little explosions all over the surface of him. Then a numbness so that, when he placed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, it was insensate, and, somewhat frightened, he pinched the back of his hand, relieved by the stab of pain.
"Do you dance, Mr. Penny?"
"Me? I—No, I guess I'm what you would call temperance when it comes to frolics."
A little clearing had been made in the parlor, a music box pricking out the "Blue Danube." From the dining room they sat regarding the three or four couples, Lilly marking time with the toe of her white-kid slipper. The elixir of the dance could rush to her head like wine, but she was not sought after as a partner, due to her reserve against a too locked embrace and a curious tendency to lead.
"To me, dancing is poetry as written by the feet."
He relieved her of her napkin and ice-cream dish, eager for suitable reply to this syrupy observation.
"Speaking of feet, have you seen the show at Forest Park Highlands this week?"
"No."
"Well, really remarkable. There is an armless fellow there who eats and juggles, even writes, with his toes."
"Indeed!"
"Sometime if you would honor me by—by accompanying—I—er—Becker, did I understand the name to be? I wonder if by any chance you are related to Ben Becker."
She turned upon him with the immemorial sense of a point about to be scored, her eyes full of relish.
"Why, I think I'm slightly related, Mr. Penny. He happens to be my father."
He whacked his thigh.
"You don't tell me! Why, I've bought rope and twine from your father for three years! A mighty fine gentleman, there. Well, well, this is a small world, after all."
She noticed his large, protuberant Adam's apple throbbing with the accelerando of pleasure, and a thaw set in between them. He let his arm drape over the back of her chair, a stolen sense of her nearness dizzying him. He was like a man with a suddenly developed new sense, which he could not tickle enough.
"Well, well!" he said. "Well, well, well!" And she sighed out again through her smile that he could fall so short of what he looked to be.
"I used to say, when I was a little girl, Mr. Penny, that I wished my father were in a more romantic business than rope and twine. I wanted him to be a florist or a wood carver or a music publisher or some of the perfectly silly things that girls get into their heads."
"I always say of myself that I must have been born with a wooden spoon in my mouth. Took to hardware from the very start. Left my stepfather's farm and general store at fifteen and made a bee line for the hardware business before I hardly knew what hardware meant. I suppose I'll die with my nose to one of those very grindstones we carry in stock and be buried with one of those same wooden spoons in my mouth. Although I always say, no burial for mine. Burn me up—cremate me when I'm finished here."
"Papa is that way, too, about his business, I mean. Tied up in twine, I tell him."
"Just ask your father if he knows Albert Penny, Miss Becker. Queer how things happen. This very day I turned over a memorandum to the head of my department, advising a certain buy in hemp rope, Becker and Co. in the back of my head all the time."
At eleven o'clock the first guest rose to go, Lilly following immediate suit.
His state of eagerness rose redly to his ears.
"Will you permit me to escort you home, Miss Becker?"
"Why, yes, if it won't upset Flora's plans for me. I only live two blocks over on Page."
"I wish you lived as far as Carondalet," he said, choking over words too strange to be his.
They walked home through quiet streets that smelled sweetly and moistly.
He was scrupulously careful of her at crossings, his tingling fingers closing over the roundest part of her arm, the warmth of her shining through to the fabric of her eider-down-bordered cape, lending it a vibrant living quality that thrilled him.
"I certainly have enjoyed a perfect evening, Miss Becker."
The magic of youth stole out of the citified night upon her.
"See!" she cried, her arm darting out of her cape, "that's Taurus up there. I can always tell him. He's green. See how he glitters to-night. Sometimes I feel sorry for Taurus. It's as if his little emerald soul is bursting to twinkle itself out of the monotony of all the white ones. That's what they were at the party to-night, all white. All of a color."
"Except you."
"Oh! Do you know the names of the stars, Mr. Penny?"
"I know the Dipper. It's our trade-mark, you know. That's how I happened to work out our nest of aluminum dippers. Wonder if you wouldn't permit me to bring you out a set of those dippers, Miss Becker. All sizes fitted into one another. Just a little kitchen novelty you might enjoy."
They were at her front steps now, the hall light flickering out over them.
"I just certainly have enjoyed this evening, Miss Becker."
"Nice of you to put it that way, Mr. Penny," she said, trying to appear unconscious of the unmistakable suns in his eyes.
"I—I'm not much of a fellow for this kind of thing, but I see I've been making a mistake. A fellow like myself ought to get about more. But most of the—er—er—ladies—young ladies—I have met, if you will pardon my saying it, haven't been the sensible kind like yourself that a fellow could sit down and have a talk with."
"I'm not very congenial, either, Mr. Penny, with the boys and girls I am thrown in with. Flora's all right, and Vincent, but I'd rather stay at home with my music or a good book than waste my time with social life. I just ache sometimes for something better."
"Well, well," he said, "we certainly agree in a lot of ways. I thought I was the only home body."
She was inside the door now, bare arm escaping the cape and out toward him.
"Good night, Miss Becker. I—I hope I may be permitted to bring over those dippers some evening."
"Why—er—yes, thank you."
"Good night."
Turning out the hall light, Lilly felt her way carefully upstairs to save creaks.
"Lilly, that you?"
"Yes."
"Tear your dress?"
"No."
"Turn out the hall light?"
"Yes."
"Tight? Wait. I'm getting up."
"Never mind."
But during the process of Lilly's undressing, huddled on the bed edge, arms hugging herself, Mrs. Becker held midnight commune.
"Who was there?"
"Oh, the usual crowd."
"Refreshments?"
"The usual."
"Anybody admire your dress?"
"No."
"Don't tell me too much, Lilly. I might enjoy hearing it."
"But, mamma, won't it keep until to-morrow? I'm sleepy now, dear."
"Who brought you home—Roy?"
"A Mr. Penny."
"Who? I thought you said only the old crowd was there. It's like pulling teeth to get a word out of you."
"A friend of Vincent's. Works at Slocum-Hines's."
"Seems to me I've heard your father mention that name. Penny—familiar.Is he nice?"
Lilly shuddered into a yawn. In the long drop of nightdress from shoulder to peeping toes, her hair cascading straight but full of electric fluff to her waist, she was as vibrant and as eupeptic as Diana, and as aloof from desire.
"Yes, he's nice enough—"
"Penny—certainly—familiar name."
"—if you like him."
"What?"
"I say he's nice enough if you like his kind."
"Well, Miss Fastidious, I wish I knew who your kind is."
"I wish I did too, mamma."
Suddenly Mrs. Becker leaned to the door, her voice lifted.
"Ben!"
"Oh, mamma, he's asleep!"
"Oh, Ben!"
"Mamma, how can you?"
"Y-yes, Carrie."
"Isn't that assistant buyer down at Slocum-Hines's, the one you say has thrown some orders in your way, named Penny?"
"Mamma, surely that will keep until morning."
"Isn't it, Ben?"
"Yes, Carrie; but come back to bed."
"I knew it! He's one of the coming young men at Slocum-Hines's. Vincent Bankhead swears by him. He throws some fine orders in your papa's way. I knew the name had a ring. Lilly, did he ask to—call?"
"Mamma, I'm sleepy."
"Did he?"
"Yes—maybe—sometime."
Then Mrs. Becker, full of small, eager ways, insisted upon tucking her daughter into bed, patting the light coverlet well up under her chin and opening the windows.
"Good night, baby," she said, giving the covers a final pat. "Sleep tight and don't get up for breakfast. I want to bring it up to you."
But, contrary to the blandishment, Lilly lay awake, open-eyed, for quite a round hour after her mother's voice, broken into occasionally by the patient but sleepy tones of her father, had died down.
From her window she could see quite a patch of sky, finely powdered with stars, the Dipper pricked out boldly.
For some reason, regarding it, a layer of tears formed on her eyes and dried over her hot stare.
On the 6th of the following July, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny were married.
The day dawned one of those imperturbable blues that hang over that latitude of the country like a hot wet blanket steaming down. The corn belt shriveled of thirst. The automobile had not yet bitten so deeply into the country roads, but even a light horse and buggy traveled in a whirligig of its own dust. St. Louis lay stark as if riveted there by the Cyclopean eye of the sun. For twenty-four hours the weather vanes of the great Middle West stood stock-still while July came in like a lion. The city slept in strange, improvised beds drawn up beside windows or made up on floors, and awoke enervated and damp at the back of the neck.
Throughout the Becker household, however, the morning moved with a whir, the newly installed telephone lifting its shrill scream, delivery wagons at the door, the horses panting under wet sponges and awning hats, Georgia wide-eyed at the concurrence of events.
For the half-dozenth time that morning Mrs. Becker suffered a little collapse, dropping down to the kitchen chair or hall bench, fanning herself with the end of her apron.
"I'm dead! Another day like this will finish me. Georgia, have you polished the door bell? Those delivery boys finger it up so. I'm wringing wet withprespiration. If only there is a breeze in the church to-night. Georgia, if that is Mr. Albert on the telephone, tell him Miss Lilly isn't going to leave her room until noon. No, wait. I want to speak to him myself. Hello, Albert? Well, bridegroom, good morning!… What's left of me is fine…. I'm making her stay in her room. Poor child, she's all nerves. Don't be late. I hate last-minute weddings. Did you see the item in the morningGlobe?… Yes, the name is spelled wrong, Pen-nie, but there's quite a few lines. 'In lieu of a honeymoon,' it goes on to say, 'the young couple will go to housekeeping at once in their new home, 5199 Page Avenue, directly across from the parents of the bride.' I'm sending over now to have all the windows opened so it won't be stuffy for you to-night. Wait until you see the presents, Albert, that came this morning. A check for five hundred dollars all the way from her uncle Buck in Alaska. That makes six hundred in checks. Three beautiful clocks, a dozen berry spoons from my euchre club, and an invitation in poetry for her to become a member of the Junior Matron Friday Club. If I wasn't so rushed I think I—I could just sit down and have a good cry. Albert, be careful of those silk sleeve garters I sent you for your wedding shirt, don't adjust them too tight; and you know how you catch cold. Don't perspire and go in a draught. And—and Albert, I see I have to remind you of little things the way I do Ben. You men with your heads so chock full of business!" (Verysotto voce.) "Send Lilly flowers this afternoon. Lilies-of-the-valley and white rosebuds. Remley's on your corner is a good place. Tell them your mother-in-law is a good customer and they'll give you a little discount…. Yes, she's upset, poor child. I was the same way. My mother almost had to shove me into the carriage. Well, Albert, call up again about noon. She'll be up by then. Good-by—son."
A pox of perspiration was out over her face, sparkling forth again after each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women into a tyranny of petty things.
Then Mrs. Becker hurried upstairs, her white wrapper floating after.
In the bathroom her husband leaned to a mirror, his jaw line thrust to the cleave of a razor.
"I really envy you, Ben. Not even your daughter's wedding day can disturb you. For a cent I could cry my eyes out. It's only excitement keeps me going. I—could—c-c-cry."
"Now, now, little woman."
She sat down on a hall chair, regarding him through the open bathroom door.
"Has she said anything to you, Ben, since yesterday? It's made me so upset."
"Now, now, little woman, you must make allowances for a young girl's nervousness."
"I know, Ben, but it worries me so. It's not natural for her to have crying spells like that one yesterday."
"Nonsense! I'm not so sure you weren't a red-eyed bride."
"My nervousness wasn't anything like hers. She'll make herself sick."
"You mean you will."
"Have you heard her moving about her room yet?"
"No."
"Shall I knock?"
"No, Carrie; now let the child alone this morning."
"I never knew her to stay in bed so long. It's after eleven, and the hair dresser coming at twelve. It will seem funny, won't it, Ben, her—little room empty to-night."
"Now, now, no waterworks. What if she was moving away to another city instead of just settling down across the street? You worked this thing your way, and even now you don't feel satisfied."
"I do feel satisfied, Ben, but I want her to be, too."
"Now, little woman, mark my word, Lilly may feel that she is doing this thing in more or less of a spirit of sacrifice to our pleasure, but inside of a week she'll be as busy and happy a little housekeeper as her mother."
"Is that her calling?"
"Yes. Go to her, Carrie."
Out in the little upper square of hallway Lilly appeared suddenly; her hair still down in the beautiful way she let it toss about her in sleep, and her body boldly outlined in a Japanese kimono she held tightly about her.
"Mamma, will you and papa please come to my room? I want to talk to you."
"Your father is shaving, Lilly. Can't you talk to us out here? How is our girl on her wedding day? Frightened? You're me all over again. Ask your father if I wasn't as pale as you are." She kissed her daughter on lips that were cold, brushing back the shower of hair from her shoulders. "You ought to see the presents, Lilly, that just—"
"Mamma—papa—you must listen."
"Yes, Lilly."
"Please, won't you let me off? Please!"
Her father regarded her from behind the white mud of lather, his eyes darkening up.
"Now, now, sweetheart," he said, using one of his rarest words of endearment, "this won't do at all."
"But I can't, papa. I just can't. I know it's terrible, this last minute, but—but—I tell you—I can't."
"My God, Ben!"
"Can't what, Lilly?"
"Can't! I never had such a funny—a terrible feeling. I can't explain it, only let me off. Please! It's not too late. Lots of girls have done it—found out at the last minute they couldn't—"
"My God! What are we to do, Ben? Ben!"
"Carrie, if only you will hold your horses I'll handle this." He mopped off his face hurriedly, sliding into a dressing gown.
"Come now, Lilly, into the front room. Sit down."
She moved after him with the rather groping look of the blind.
"Now what is this nonsense, Lilly, you've been hinting these last few days?"
"I've made a mistake, papa. I should have said so weeks—ago—from the start. It isn't Albert's fault. It isn't anybody's fault. I've had it all along, this queer feeling all through the engagement and parties, but I kept hoping for your sakes I'd get over it—hoping—in vain—"
"Why, of course, Lilly, you'll get over it! It's natural for a young girl to feel—"
"No! No! My feeling won't lift! If only I had said nothing the night he—proposed. But mamma was waiting up. She—she pressed me so. It was so hard the way you put it. I know he's a fine fellow. I know, papa, he's thrown big orders in your way. But I can't help being what I am. Please, papa, let me off! Please!"
An actual shrinkage of face seemed to have taken place in Mrs. Becker.
"What'll we do? What'll we do, Ben?" she kept repeating, rocking herself back and forth in what seemed to border on dementia.
"You see, papa, it's only to be a small wedding. We could so easily call things off. I'll take all the blame—"
"No! No! No!"
"Mamma dear, I'm as sorry—about it as you are, but—"
"No! No! She's ruining our lives, Ben—disgracing—"
"Lilly, are you sure that you are telling us everything?"
"I swear it, papa. I know I'm inarticulate, I don't seem able to explain the terrible state I've been in for days—"
"It's nervousness, Lilly."
"I tell you, no! I can't make you understand. But I'm not cut out, papa, for what I'm going to settle down to. I'm something else than what you think I am. I guess I—I am a sort of botanical sport, papa, off our family tree. I know what you're going to say, and maybe you're right. I may have more ideas than I have talent, but let me go my way. Let me be what I am."
"Lilly, Lilly, let us take this thing step by step, quietly. Surely, daughter, you appreciate the enormity of the situation!"
"I do. I do."
"Now to go back to the beginning. Did you consent to this engagement of your own free will?"
"I did and I didn't."
"You didn't?"
"Oh, I know you let me decide for myself, but don't you think I felt the undercurrent of your attitudes? All the other girls settling down, as you put it. You and Albert such good friends, and then Albert himself so—so what he should be."
"Now you are talking. If your mother and I hadn't felt that Albert was the fine and upright man for their little girl to marry, do you think they would have—"
"I know! There we go around in the circle again. Everything is perfect. The little house, Albert's promotion to first assistant. Everything perfect, but me. I don't want it. I don't love him. You hear me! There is something in me he hasn't touched. Respect him? Yes, but respect is only a poor relation to love and comes in for the left-over and the cast-off emotions."
"Her head is full of the novels she reads!"
"You can't keep me from thinking like a woman. Feeling like one. Is it shameful to want to love? Is it wrong to desire in the man you are to marry that fundamental passion that makes the world go around? I'm not supposed to know any thing about the thing I'm plunging into until after I've plunged! I'm afraid, papa. Save me!"
"Ben, I could swear who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers. I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School the year before she graduated."
"Mamma! Mamma!" fairly exploded to her feet by the potency of her sense of outrage. "Oh, you—you—"
"I know I'm right."
"Why, I haven't even seen him since I graduated! I've never talked ten words to the man in my life! Oh—oh—how can you?"
"Just the same, he's been your ruination. Since you got him into your head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish to God I'd never lived to see this day—"
"Carrie!"
"I do. Noon of my daughter's wedding day, and she can't make up her mind whether she'll be married or not. O God! it's funny—love, now at the last minute—oh—oh—" A geyser of hysteria shot up, raining down in a glassy kind of laugh. "Oh—oh, it's funny!—love—"
"Carrie, you're hysterical. Here, smell this ammonia."
"The little house—my heart's blood in it. A doll's house, ready for her to walk into. Membership in the Junior Matrons—trousseau—oh, it's funny—funny—"
"For God's sake, papa, try to calm her!"
"Funny—funny—funny."
With a wave of sobs that broke over her, she went down, then, literally to her knees, her back heaving and shuddering.