But outside the sharply defined inclosures of their business lives, the brothers went down into a wordless vale of fifteen years of estrangement, not in enmity, but rather as a hatpin, plunged through the heart, can kill, bloodlessly.
CHAPTER VII
When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's passions was a gale through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a devastating one in a children's hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible passions lay just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl aged four had once been found battered and dead beside a farm hand's dinner pail in St. Louis County! Suddenly all the faces she could conjure began to form staring circles around her—the Visigoths. Minnie Dupree. Ida Blair. Auchinloss. Phonzie. Phonzie!
She decided to walk fast and long and ran downstairs out into the little areaway that ran like an alley from stage entrance to sidewalk. A newly installed nickelodeon, adjoining, was already lighted, throwing out a hard white shine and tinned music at the instance of five cents in the slot. In the glaring pallor Bruce Visigoth was suddenly at her side, his felt hat bunched up in his hand and his hair wet-looking, as if drenched with perspiration.
"I couldn't let you go without apologizing, Mrs. Penny."
She smiled with lips that would pull to the nervous impulse to cry.
"The idea!" she said, feeling the words tawdry and provincial as they came.
"It was my fault for permitting it to happen in the presence of a third party—you especially."
"Those things cannot always be avoided," again biting down into her tongue for its banality.
"Will you forget it as if it had never occurred?"