The words were so stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he had been slapped.
"Lilly, for God's sake, you—you cannot be serious!"
"No mock heroics—please."
His ears tipped with flame; he straightened back from her.
"No more mock heroics," he said, in a voice suddenly quieted down like vichy gone stale. "Forgive an old—fool—a young—fool—and forget it. Thank you for jerking me up."
He raised her limp hand, bowing over it until his lips hovered but did not touch.
"My solemn word on it this time—no more—mock—heroics." And still Lilly, on the click of the door after him, could not clear her brain of the running threnody of nonsense:
People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,
Oklahoma.
CHAPTER XII
Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact, when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her in Ida Blair's Long Island bungalow.