"For God's sake, gramaw, be quiet! It's nothing. Had a row with that red-headed clerk down at the drug store. Took the freshness out of him for a while."
Lilly tiptoed back to her room. All through a fitful night she woke in little starts, kissing into the bare white arm of her child as if she could not have done with the assurance of her safe proximity.
It was less than a month later, and over a year after the adenoidal operation, that Harry returned home one evening from the real-estate office with nine dollars and forty cents in his pocket from the proceeds of the nickel-plated wash-room faucets and several liquid-soap attachments.
* * * * *
About eight months after Ida Blair's play had lain gathering mold in the lower drawer of Bruce Visigoth's desk, he sent for Lilly.
Their office relationship since the stuffy June evening over the reading of the manuscript had been resumed, with invisible joindure. Together they continued in biweekly conferences to compile the endless cycle of programs that moved like a chain along the cogs of city to city. There were nine Enterprise Amusement Theaters now, the newest red-headed pin on the circuit map as far west as Tulsa, their booking route as yet independent of any of the larger and recent vaudeville mergers.
It was an office boast and pleasantry that Lilly could recite offhand through the current program of any of the nine theaters, leaping glibly from motion picture, to acrobat, and sister acts.
This was hardly true, but her touch at the steering wheel of her department was sensitive and sure. She could substitute for a quarantined team of jumping Arabs in Springfield, Illinois, with hardly more than a sleight of hand through her card index and a telegram or two. She knew that Memphis would not stand for a pickaninny act, and that the same was sure fire in Trenton, and was familiar with every house manager by long-distance-telephone voice. The department was more and more the well-oiled engine under a light steering hand that Lilly wielded well and wisely.
Her judgment of the incoming reports of the various house managers, or a try-out act, although technically subject to Bruce Visigoth's signature, went usually unchallenged. She virtually was her department, particularly as the realty aspect of the enterprise came more and more to assume the proportions of big business. Within her little office of mahogany appointments she worked with an allotment of stenographers and clerks. She had an assistant, too; at least, she confiscated him from the press department—one Leon Greenberg, a young night student from New York University, with an enormous profile rendered positively carnivorous of thrust by his struggle up from First Street and Avenue A, which is mire with a pull to it.
Her own capacity was unnamed. She was probably still down on the books as stenographer, although at fifty dollars a week now, and it was six years since she had taken a letter.