She half rose to her feet.
Down in front!
She sat again, but a sudden, an inexplicable sense of wanting to plunge from the height of the balcony seized her. It had been so long since the old neuralgic stabbings of spirit. She wanted to jump and had a ludicrous vision of herself landing down in the cream of white shoulders and crashing through the U of one of those immaculate shirt fronts. She could have torn and scratched the indestructibility of her failure and wanted suddenly and terribly to wrap those pearl-twined taffy braids around the rising throat of Marguerite as she sprayed the auditorium with the "Jewel Song," a great fire hose of liquid music finding out every cranny.
In the deep-napped velvet of this melodious darkness Lilly rose suddenly, pushing her way out through knee-impeded aisles and a string of protestations.
An usher helped her to find a door. She ran down several flights and into a side street. A slant of rain met her and she charged into it with bent head and umbrella. Bubbles with a tap of sleet in them exploded like little torpedoes on the sidewalks, curbs were rushing water, and Broadway was as black and oily-looking as a foundry. She tried to visualize it as she had seen it that first morning from her window at the Hudson Hotel, pink with sun.
The picture would not conjure, and finally, because her shoes were full of bubbles and her damp skirt clung and hindered walking, she boarded a street car and sat looking out of the water-lashed windows, her throat full of little moans like the song of a kettle just about to boil.
When she reached home there was an envelope beneath her door. It contained a snapshot picture of herself and Zoe taken by Mrs. Dupree one Sunday afternoon. Still wet, she sat down with it on the bed edge. Against a background of shrub and stone steps Lilly was little more than a blur, but Zoe, with five little fingers dug into her cheek, leaped from the picture, all her dimples out.
The mood induced by the opera fell off like a cloak, a warm, easy tear splashing right down on the adorable little face. She wiped it off ever so painstakingly, holding the little print up to the gas to dry.
Then she stood it up on the table so she could gaze down and smile while she undressed, and even placed it on the floor as she leaned down to unlace her shoes. She climbed into bed with it under her pillow, but rose in the darkness to transfer it, against crumpling, beneath the mattress.
She went to sleep right off with a little smile on her lips, as if the picture had kissed it there, but it was many a day, sixteen years, in fact, before she could be induced to enter the Metropolitan Opera House again, and then only in the most crowded hour of her life.