"Wait until nice lady sees mother's beautiful, then she'll be glad to watch over her."
Mysteriously, it seemed to Lilly, there was nothing of the button nose so peculiar to infants about her child. Its was tipped with character; so, too, the little mouth in the firm way it had of closing.
"Say, but ain't she a beauty!" capitulated the matron.
"Isn't she! Isn't she!"
"Look at them curls. You ought to enter her in a show, ma'am."
"You will see to her carefully until I return, won't you? She sleeps that way always, sweetly and deeply."
"Why, I'll sit and rock her myself this very minute."
When Lilly went out into the darkness there were the ten cents in her bag and the blurry outline of things she finally laid to hunger. She walked downward for some blocks, finally entering a Third Avenue lunch room and ordering a ten-cent bowl of beef stew. She took it from a tablespoon like a thick soup, its warmth flowing through her and dissipating a chilly discomfort. But her face still felt rather drawn, and, regarding herself in the pink net-draped mirror, she took to rubbing her cheeks, an old, schoolgirl device against pallor. She was quite becomingly large-eyed from the deadly aching tiredness that lay over her, but otherwise the old whiteness of her skin flowed unmarred and intact, also that unadorned look of nun to her face where the hair left it so cleanly.
Beside her at one of the marble-topped tables a great, hefty motorman in uniform kept finding out her knee and pressing it.
"Stop it," she said, "or I'll call the proprietor."