"You mean you don't see it, either?" "But you do." "But--" "No 'buts.' She goes into rehearsal for a spring try-out in Baltimore, Stamford, or any of the dog towns. I'm giving the manuscript to Forbes to read this week. He's the man to direct that type of thing. I'm going to throw in ten or twenty thousand on your judgment." "You're serious?" He held out his lean hand. "Ill send for Ida Blair." "No--please!" "Why?" "Sit down." She did, biting back excitement. "I don't know how to talk to that little woman. She depresses me. This is your venture and mine." "But her play! Its production will mean her resurrection. Her monument to a memory. Her protest. A chance to get her on her feet. An opportunity for a home, a background, a reason for living to a woman who has lost every reason. It's her play and her chance." "And it is our venture." "I'm not afraid." "Are we partners, then?" "If I had the money, yes, to my limit." "I don't mean that." "I do." "All right; go your limit." "My limit? How far would six one-hundred-dollar municipal bonds and--" "Good. I'll sell you six per cent of a twenty-thousand-dollar venture for the six hundred." "Six--percent--twenty--thousand--Why, that's not a man-to-man proposition! You're treating me like a child." "All right, then; three per cent for the six hundred." "Done! But no nonsense. If I lose, I lose. Man to man." "'Man to man,'" he said, clasping her hand and drinking down deep into her gaze. And so, when she hurried out to the high ledge to which Ida Blair's figure had somehow shaped itself as the years went on, she stood for a moment to steady the hand she placed on that shoulder. "Ida!" The older woman raised her eyes of the peculiarly washed quality of gray that has faded from repeated scaldings in hot water. "Mr. Visigoth wants you in his office, dear--now." She kept her voice out of quaver, but it had a singing quality like a plucked violin string. CHAPTER IV As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her daughter, toward a subject about which she knew nothing, but, in an inchoate way, felt a great deal. The New York State fight for woman's suffrage had not yet reached its victorious culmination, and, reading announcement of a great parade up Fifth Avenue for a Saturday afternoon, she took Zoe. The smell of spring was dancingly out. Shop windows bloomed with the millinery of May. Open street cars, open skies, and openwork shirt waists had arrived. They climbed the flank of an omnibus and rode down to the Washington Arch in a midair snapping with bunting. It was on one of those irresistible afternoons--radiant with the sun-washed geometry of three architectural renaissances, a monastic-fronted fur emporium, a Parthenon of a library, a Doric-columned bank--that Lilly and Zoe lumbered their omnibus way through the daily carnival of the most rococo avenue in the world.