"Mother's darling! Twiddle-de-darling. Moonlit flake! Beautifulest.
Zoeist flower in the world. Mine alone! Alone mine! Oodle-de-dums.
To-morrow! To-morrow!"
* * * * *
There followed for Lilly a week of scars, each exactly as deep as the day was long.
First, the heartbreaking business of giving over her child to the chappy-faced nurse and a rear room of nursery hung in the odors of formaldehyde and lined up into a ward of white iron cribs, each screened in with a clothes horse of little flannel garments of a thickness that wrung Lilly's heart.
There were now two additional occupants—a poor, top-heavy infant with a fourteen-year-old mother, father unknown, and the teething baby of one of the blue-uniformed inmates whose routine allowed her periods of the day to nurstle her child.
That was the wrench that began each day. To abandon the pink-and-white bloom that slept all night without crying in the cove of her arm, to the grayness of a nursery that should have been pink and white and sweetly fragrant with powders and puffs and the rosy kind of tufted coverlets with scent between them that her mother had once sewn over with bowknots for the Kemble baby.
She was guilty of extravagances that ate menacingly into the four remaining five-dollar bills. Against the protests of the practical nurse she promptly discarded the long muslin swaddling dress, whose superfluous length wound around the little feet, purchasing three short and sheer ones, also a doll-size toilet set painted in little clumps of forget-me-nots. The hair brush had a thick, soft nap which would spin out her child's curls into a cloud of gold. They really were the color, these curls, of a jar of strained honey seen through sunlight. It was as if she could never tire of feeling them wind to her finger.
The nurse she kept placated with tips in outlandish proportion to her funds, and often a memory of that dip of lip curving terrifyingly across her consciousness would scurry homeward to this gray-and-black abode of theirs, which only contained them on a tolerance that day after day seared deeply into her being.
Slowly but surely her none too immaculately shod feet ceased their pilgrimages to the agencies. She did apply one sultry morning in answer to an advertisement for a "refined indoor entertainer, city work," only to find the usual fee exhortation thinly backed by promises. For the most part she marked off at her breakfast table in the adjoining Swedish lunch room, under the newspaper heading, "Help Wanted, Female," the demands for stenographers, companions, hat models, and, on one occasion, for a cashier's vacancy in a Madison Avenue florist's.
A persistent streak of circumstances seemed to prohibit her success. Upon three occasions it happened that she waited all morning in a line, only to see the applicant directly in front of her chosen for the position. At the florist's shop, bond was required. A lawyer in the Flatiron Building asked her to type a specimen letter for him, and laid heavy lips on the curl at the nape of her neck as she bent to his dictation. R.L. Ginsburg, of the Ginsburg-Flatow Millinery Company, engaged her services, and kissed her squarely on the lips to seal the bargain.