It seemed to Lilly that almost any of these mild days Washington Irving, in pot hat and lace in his sleeves, might come strolling this pompous Square. She bought a manhandled copy of Volume I of Knickerbocker's History of New York off a secondhand bookstall one day, and read it sitting on the sun-drenched stoop of one of the old houses whose eyeless stare and boarded windows bespoke one absent family. Off this same stall she also purchased a volume of Wordsworth's poems, feeling a vague, a procreative, and who shall say mistaken need for beauty. Over and over she read, milking each phrase dry:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting and cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come from God who is our home.
She read of daffodils as if she would steep her soul in the sun of their yellowness, bought some one morning and propped them in the toothbrush mug.
She practiced her shorthand, too, these days, in a blank book bought for the purpose, sometimes an hour—even two or three—until the sun receded off the stoop.
Then for a week it rained, and from the patch of back yard, two stories beneath her window, began to mount the moist smell of living earth. Beside this open window, after the harrowing mornings of dentistry, with a soft rain falling from a sky swift and low with clouds, she wrote, her pencil dabbing constantly at the well of her tongue, a short story of some six thousand words composed out of the fabric of an idea that suddenly presented itself. She copied it in her most painstaking handwriting, on one side of foolscap, and sent it, with return postage, to a popular magazine.
She was venturing out less and less, preparing over a portable oil stove her own breakfast, and very often her own lunch and dinner. She tried to sew, too, cutting up one of the sheerest and prettiest of her nightgowns into a litter of small garments, but almost immediately her hands would fall idle and the great waves of terror begin to surge.
Certain inevitable decisions crept closer. She decided against the Hanna Larchmont Hospital, its very foyer awakening in her such a sickening sense of public institution that she ventured no farther, but engaged a tiny room in a private sanitarium in Nineteenth Street, at twenty dollars a week, and the privilege of boarding on two or three weeks after her discharge.
Her bag of three new one-hundred-dollar bills still hung in all its reassuring entirety from the little pink ribbon about her neck, but the confronting dentist's bill of twenty-five dollars, and the slow but acid process of daily expenditure eating into the thirty or forty dollars left in her purse, lay uncomfortably against her consciousness.
By a series of constantly repeated calculations, particularly if the short story should bring in even a check large enough to cover the dentistry, Lilly planned to span the weeks of her narrowing interval with the three bills intact, but pretty shortly the first piece of mail she had received in New York arrived in a long, bulky envelope:
MY DEAR MISS PARLOW,—Thank you for submitting the accompanying manuscript. It does not quite get across in this office, but it is near enough to our standard for us to want to see anything more you may care to submit.—THE EDITOR.