There were already forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents hoarded in a little biscuit tin in the depths of her valise, and out of it had come a gift for Mrs. Dupree, a rather interesting relic of an old silver thimble wrought in cunning filigree which she had bought in two payments of seventy-five cents each, and largely by eliminating the pie for a month, from a rapidly diminishing keep-chest of Ida Blair's. A friendship had sprung up here, which, born out of the merest propinquity, had sent down strong roots into the common ground between them. One or two nights they had attended the theater together, on orchestra passes given out to them by one or the other of the Visigoths. One Wednesday evening they saw the "School for Scandal" presented at the Academy of Music, and once, just before the permanent departure of R.J. for Chicago, he had tossed negligently across the desk a single balcony ticket for Eames in "Faust." "Here is something ought to keep one of you busy this rainy evening." Ensued a highly feminine parley. "Mrs. Blair, you take the ticket. Really, I'm too tired and I've some sewing to do." "Nonsense! You're musical and I'm not. Besides, it will do you a world of good." "I don't know," said Lilly, her lips giving a sensitive quiver. "I've put it so out of my mind that it might only tantalize." But in the end she did attend, seating herself, for the first time in her life, in the F-minor, the perfumed twilight of the Metropolitan Opera House, just as the velvet curtains swished sibilantly apart. Day was breaking, and in all the passion and churchiness of Gounod, the student calls for death, the echoes of human happiness rustling through the background like the scything sound of harvesting. Lilly could scarcely breathe for the poignancy of sensation. She was all throat. Faust's opening greeting to the dawn, his challenge to happiness, pierced her. She sat forward on her chair, anticipating the lyrical vision of Marguerite, her hands clasped over the handle of her wet umbrella, and her knees crowded up unconsciously about its dampness. She bought the libretto, humming down into it between acts and leaping ahead to verify her memory of the score. Poor Lilly, it is doubtful if she was by endowment more than a lovely melomaniac doomed never to emerge from her musical primaries. A mere tonal accord could assail her nostrils like a perfume set to music. And yet her quick ear, though, was not exact. Her capacity for fine vocal distinctions in her own singing had been distinctly limited, and a note landing just this side of itself could drop down into her state of ecstatic coma with hardly a plop. She had neither capacity for exactitude nor tireless fidelity to tone. It made her neck ache. She had never graduated from musical sensation to cerebration; a theme washed her over with all the voluptuous abandon of a Henner sea siren letting the water tickling up the beach to roll over her lightly.