After that Lilly sat in her nightdress beside the window, her eagerness for the day allayed to an extent by her rising sense of panic. She tried to lay her despair. Unthinkable that this new day, dawning so pinkly over chimney pots, would not prove itself a friend in her great need. By eight-thirty, at the instance of a newspaper advertisement, she was the first applicant at the Acme Publishing Company, East Twenty-third Street, a narrow five-story building with ground-floor offices and a tremor through it from the champ of presses. She obtained this time from a woman who accepted her lack of reference rather negligibly. She, too, asked her to compose a specimen letter acknowledging receipt of a translator's manuscript. She accomplished it with a glibness that brought a flush to her cheek and a smile to the face of her employer. Lilly thought she had never beheld such spick-and-span efficiency as this woman's. The smooth white hair arranged with a conservative eye to the prevailing mode. The clean, untired skin and rather large, able hands. She made mental note of the crisp organdie collar and cuffs, and was suddenly conscious that her shoes were too short of vamp, and her heels run down because they were too high. A revulsion of taste flowed over Lilly; she hated suddenly the rather tawdry cape piped in red, and mentally retailored herself with a new feeling for simplicity. Her sinkage of heart at the proffered eight dollars a week was followed by a quick resurgence of vitality at the prospect of the advancement held out. Her predecessor was being promoted to first reader! _The Paradise Trail_, a best seller of the moment, had been written in those same offices during spare moments of one of the proof readers. The Acme Publishing Company printed paperback editions of translations from the more highly papriked of current French novels. The instinct to write rose in Lilly, the quick flame of her faddism easily aroused. Here was nothing more than a stroke of fate. A long-laid plan for a novel lifted, an entire panorama of resolutions dramatizing themselves. The easy hours from nine to four. Long evenings at work beside the crib. A _nom de plume_, of course--Ann something. Ann Netherland. But eight dollars! Her heart tightened. She had obtained, the day previous, at a Lexington Avenue Children's Hospital she chanced to pass, the address of an institution at Spuyten Duyvil said to be conducted for the children of professional parents, and conducted by Minnie Dupree, an old stock actress remembered by the generation preceding Lilly's for the heavier Shakespearean roles. Her mind leaped to this. Yes, she would return at two o'clock, ready to begin work, and went out into a day warm with sunshine. A quick resolve formed itself. She inquired at some length in a corner drug store, finally taking a train for Spuyten Duyvil, and fifteen minutes later descended to a little station upon the edge of a park that was brilliant with new green.