There were already forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents hoarded in a little biscuit tin in the depths of her valise, and out of it had come a gift for Mrs. Dupree, a rather interesting relic of an old silver thimble wrought in cunning filigree which she had bought in two payments of seventy-five cents each, and largely by eliminating the pie for a month, from a rapidly diminishing keep-chest of Ida Blair's.
A friendship had sprung up here, which, born out of the merest propinquity, had sent down strong roots into the common ground between them.
One or two nights they had attended the theater together, on orchestra passes given out to them by one or the other of the Visigoths.
One Wednesday evening they saw the "School for Scandal" presented at the Academy of Music, and once, just before the permanent departure of R.J. for Chicago, he had tossed negligently across the desk a single balcony ticket for Eames in "Faust."
"Here is something ought to keep one of you busy this rainy evening."
Ensued a highly feminine parley.
"Mrs. Blair, you take the ticket. Really, I'm too tired and I've some sewing to do."
"Nonsense! You're musical and I'm not. Besides, it will do you a world of good."
"I don't know," said Lilly, her lips giving a sensitive quiver. "I've put it so out of my mind that it might only tantalize."
But in the end she did attend, seating herself, for the first time in her life, in the F-minor, the perfumed twilight of the Metropolitan Opera House, just as the velvet curtains swished sibilantly apart.