Lilly alone had sent in a negative report—"Too sophisticated and not sufficient emotional appeal for vaudeville." On the strength of several opposing yeas, the playlet was booked, and removed after the second performance—a little secret feather which Lilly wore jauntily on a little secret cap.
In these eight weeks a quiescence that was like a hand to the reverberating parchment of a drum had come over her. It was, in fact, as if the whole throbbing orchestration of her universe had stopped as it sometimes can seem to upon the motion-picture screen, leaving the action to click on quietly without the excitation of music.
She had taken, at the instance of Mrs. Blair, a room in an Eleventh Street house. The odor of Bohemia, which is the odor of poverty through cigarette smoke, lay on the hallways. There were frequent all-night revelries reverberated down from the skylight room on the top floor, and one evening a passing group had beat a can-can of invitation on her doorway; but she could lock and bolt herself into her room, a box, it is true, at two dollars and a half a week, but it boasted half curtains of yellow scrim, a couch-bed with a moth-eaten but gay wool cover, and a small square of table with a reading lamp attached by a tube to the gas jet.
She found herself during the routine of her business day looking forward to these long, quiet evenings beside the tiny table. There had been eight unbroken weeks of them, and each Sunday a fresh little mound of sheer garments to be carried out to Spuyten Duyvil. Her old inaptitude with the needle, by no means overcome, hampered her so that her stitches were often wandering gypsy trails to be ripped over and over, and then her fingers leaving little prick stains to be washed out.
She had grown thinner, so much so that a slight jaw line had come out, but the shells were gone from beneath her eyes and it pleased her, when she brushed out her hair before going to bed, to see that its electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows when she arched them.
She liked to stand before her wavy mirror, folding the completed garments and looking back at herself. Newly freed, probably by the great Auchinloss and her daughter between them, from the bondage of an idea, she felt corporeally lighter, and was. The toothache of her being had ceased its neuralgic stabbings.
It was not unusual for her to stand before this mirror before climbing into bed, her mouth bunched to mimetics.
"Zoe, come to mother. Mother! Daughter, they're shouting for you! Let me hold your flowers, darling; they'll smother you!… You mean the one with the yellow curls, madam? The valedictorian? That's my daughter!"
All the spots would come out in her eyes, like little "niggers" in a pair of diamonds, and more often than not she would fall asleep then with a crescent moon of a smile lying deeply into her face.
One day, after these weeks of minute fidelity to routine, she was startled somewhat by a request from Robert Visigoth, in the form of a note sent over to her desk, to remain after six to take some dictation. The big temporary-looking office with its absence of partitions and staring lack of privacy had become a paradoxical source of security to her. In all the eight weeks, three of which, it is true, he had spent in Chicago, she had not once encountered Robert Visigoth alone. She had subconsciously developed the habit of peering down the dark stairs that led to the stage door before descending them, and on one or two occasions, when they chanced to pass, had flattened herself rather unduly against the wall. Her comings and goings, whether by maneuver or not, were seldom alone. She and this Mrs. Blair, a sparse, umbrella of a woman with a very bitter kind of widowhood, had formed the noonday habit of taking a dairy lunch of milk and cereal at a near-by White Kitchen and of departing evenings for there, too, since it spelled strong, hot, simple foods and a very superior kind of cleanliness.