Then she stood it up on the table so she could gaze down and smile while she undressed, and even placed it on the floor as she leaned down to unlace her shoes. She climbed into bed with it under her pillow, but rose in the darkness to transfer it, against crumpling, beneath the mattress. She went to sleep right off with a little smile on her lips, as if the picture had kissed it there, but it was many a day, sixteen years, in fact, before she could be induced to enter the Metropolitan Opera House again, and then only in the most crowded hour of her life. CHAPTER V Quite a friendship was thriving between Lilly and Mrs. Blair. The older woman had opened the door to her upon that family skeleton, one of which, by the way, lurks in the cupboards of most of us--the unproduced play! This one, a sketch called "The Web," read by Lilly and even placed by her with a written word of appreciation on Robert Visigoth's desk. He carried it with him to Chicago, mailing it back one day without comment. "Just the same, there is a corking idea there. You ought to develop it into a long play, Mrs. Blair." "I will some day," she replied, with a cryptic something in her voice that Lilly was only to understand a year later. One spring evening, that year later, as she and Mrs. Blair sat in her small room beside the open window that looked out over the twilighted rear of housetops, Lilly was induced to sing, quietly, almost under her breath, sitting there on the floor with her hands clasped about her knees, her invariable shirt waist and dark-blue skirt discarded for a pleasant sense of negligee in a pink cotton-crepe kimono, her hair flowing with the swift sort of rush peculiar to it. They had just completed, as a relief from the nightly round of lunch rooms, a wood-alcohol meal of canned baked beans, cheese, crackers, and tinned sweet cakes. Even Mrs. Blair, at an age when the years are at the throat of a woman, shriveling it, had opened her blouse at the neck, revealing an unsuspected survival of its whiteness. Lilly sang "Jocelyn," a lullaby dimmed in her memory by the mist of years and full of inaccuracies. She had last sung it at Flora Kemble's. It lay on the twilight after she had finished. "How pretty! Why don't you let one of the Visigoths hear you? It might lead to something." "Robert V. has heard me." "Well, I don't pretend to be a judge of music, but considering your youth and looks and when I see the kind of thing that does get across--"