"How much do you think she weighs?" he was fond of interrogating, with his small parental eyes full of pride. "Hundred and thirty-six for thirteen years. Not bad, eh?"
With about the sickest sensation she was ever to know, Lilly saw him this day lead his daughter past her open door, his face averted and the roll of fat at the back of his neck redly conscious.
It was after this incident that a half plan, long dormant, lifted its head. Every day in her comings and goings through the wide fireproof corridors of the Forty-second Street building a sign on a ground-glass door waved at her like a flag:
MISS NELLIE TERRY
Playbroker
Authors'
Manuscripts
Placed
She had little doubt of her ability to launch out into a scheme of this sort for herself and liked to incubate the idea in the back of her head, going so far as to inspect a tiny office on the fifteenth floor, mentally furnishing it up, and visualizing her name in neat black letters on her own ground-glass door.
She did broach the subject to Zoe one evening, who, with her head wrapped in a brilliant fez improvised out of an old cushion top, stood before the mirror, attitudinizing her part in school entertainment.
"No! Don't go into anything tin horn like that! I hate for you to keep playing second fiddle."
In the pause that followed, hardly perceptible enough to hold the drop of a pin, Zoe flashed toward her mother, the colossal ego of her youth somehow penetrated for the moment.