One evening, while Harry was performing his willing chore of carrying out for his grandmother the little dinner prepared by Mrs. Schum and partaken of by Lilly and Zoe at a small card table opened up beside the window of their room, Zoe announced, with a certain high-handedness with which Lilly was more and more hard pressed to cope: "I want my dresses longer. That big red-headed boy in the white jacket said to me when I went into the drug store over on Columbus Avenue to-day for some licorice drops: 'That's right. Wear 'em short; you've got the stems.'" "What a vulgar, horrid remark!" "Well, I want my dresses longer." Lilly regarded her daughter with concern troubling up her eyes. "Don't ever go into that store again, Zoe. I've a mind to stop in there myself and talk to the proprietor." Later that same evening, Harry, with a purpling eye and an opened lip which he tried vainly to smuggle past his grandmother, crept into his room. But she was too quick for him, and at her high cry of shock Lilly rushed into the hallway. There was an utterly alien and vibrating note of anger in Harry's voice. "For God's sake, gramaw, be quiet! It's nothing. Had a row with that red-headed clerk down at the drug store. Took the freshness out of him for a while." Lilly tiptoed back to her room. All through a fitful night she woke in little starts, kissing into the bare white arm of her child as if she could not have done with the assurance of her safe proximity. It was less than a month later, and over a year after the adenoidal operation, that Harry returned home one evening from the real-estate office with nine dollars and forty cents in his pocket from the proceeds of the nickel-plated wash-room faucets and several liquid-soap attachments. * * * * * About eight months after Ida Blair's play had lain gathering mold in the lower drawer of Bruce Visigoth's desk, he sent for Lilly. Their office relationship since the stuffy June evening over the reading of the manuscript had been resumed, with invisible joindure. Together they continued in biweekly conferences to compile the endless cycle of programs that moved like a chain along the cogs of city to city. There were nine Enterprise Amusement Theaters now, the newest red-headed pin on the circuit map as far west as Tulsa, their booking route as yet independent of any of the larger and recent vaudeville mergers. It was an office boast and pleasantry that Lilly could recite offhand through the current program of any of the nine theaters, leaping glibly from motion picture, to acrobat, and sister acts.