He kissed her again on the ear lobe and the nape of her neck.
"Good-by, Lilly, and if I were you I'd have a little talk with mother if I found myself not feeling just right. I'm sending Joe up with a pair of granite scrub buckets and that stopper for the bathtub. All right?"
"Yes."
After a while she could hear him below, the tink of breakfast cutlery and the little passings in and out of Lena through the swinging pantry door. Then the front door closed gently, and on its click she swung herself lightly out of bed, standing barefooted behind the Swiss curtains to watch the square-shouldered figure swing across the street toward the Page Avenue car. Her energy to be up and doing suddenly unstoppered, she turned back to the room, jerking out a dresser drawer until it flew out to the floor.
At nine o'clock she was still in her nightdress, sloughing about in an engagement gift of little blue knitted bedroom slippers. There were the new valise and an old dress-suitcase tightly packed and shoved beneath the bed, and over a chair a tan-linen suit inserted with strips of large-holed embroidery that had been dyed in coffee by Katy Stutz. It had originally been designed as a traveling suit for a honeymoon trip to Excelsior Springs until that project had been decided against in favor of immediate possession of the little house.
"Put that extra money into your furniture," Mrs. Becker had advised, to which Albert had been highly amenable.
There was a large pièce de resistance of a hat, too, floppy of brim and borne down at one spot by an enormous flat satin rose. Lilly had rebelled against its cart-wheel proportions, but in the end her mother's selection prevailed.
She dressed hurriedly, emerging from her bath with her hair wet at the edges, but combing back easily into its smoothness.
Her nervousness conveyed itself to her mostly through her breathing; it was short and very fast, but she was as cool of the flesh as the fresh linen she donned. That was part of the clean young wonder of her. Her vitality flowed and showered back upon itself, like the ornamental waters of a fountain. She awoke like a rose with the dew on. Even Albert Penny, rubbing the grit out of his eyes, had marveled at the matinal bloom of her.
She ran in her movements, closing drawers and doors after her to keep down her rising sense of confusion, pinning where fingers could not wait to fit hook to eye. There were twenty-eight dollars in her little brown-leather purse and a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars, payable to "self," in a little chamois bag around her neck.