"It's begun, Lilly, to be wonderful!" "What?" "Life!" * * * * * The Saturday afternoon following, in a brownstone house in West Forty-sixth Street that was more like a museum of the storied loot of many lands, Trieste himself opened the pair of Florentine doors, originally unhinged from a campanile outside of Rome, of his very private studio, without appointment, to the magic of Gedney Daab's scrawled card. He had a head, Lilly decided, like the one of Praxiteles in the St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts--only, the bust implied young hair, and Trieste's curls were full of gray and the lines of his face were slashed deeply. He listened, while Lilly talked her brief preamble, as he invariably did, with his eyes closed and finger tips touching. Finally, he opened them, regarding Lilly from under swollen, rather diabetic lids. "You should sing," he said, his acquired language grating slightly against the native one. "No! No!" "You are young," he said, running his eyes down her body, "and fine and big and strong." She rose as if to throw off the crowding stress of the moment. "Once," she said; "but that is all over now. My little girl--" "You have temperament--let me hear," he said, reaching out to the piano and striking out a bold C. "Sing the scale." "Please!" she cried, the situation an agony to her. "Not me. My little--" "Why, Lilly!" said Zoe, regarding her mother with wide, unaffected eyes. "Sing the scale, dear." "Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do"--through a crimson flush. He seemed to lose interest then, turning to Zoe. "Let me hear you," he said. "Shall I sing 'Jocelyn' or 'How Like a Bird'?" "Anything--something simpler." "Schubert, then, Zoe." In her straight frock, with its wide patent-leather belt and flat white collar, the cascade of her hair down over it, Zoe held the center of the vast studio, singing straight into her mother's eyes. It seemed to Lilly, at the sound of that voice, not yet cleared of childish treble, but as ready to rise as a lark, that every ounce of her blood must be gushing against her throat; so, after it was finished, she sat on quite dumbly, staring at the manner in which Trieste remained sitting with his eyes closed. "Lyric soprano," he said, finally. "Fine! Big! God-given!" "_Maestro_--you mean that?" "Heigh-ho!" he said on a sigh, walking over and placing his hand on Zoe's curls. "I make up my mind I am seeck of this business. I wait only for this war to live my day quietly in Capri, where I have my _casa_, and now a new nightingale flies in at my window. Twice now. Ten years ago comes Carrienta out of just such a clear sky, and once more, when I am again sure that one voice is only more unmusical than the rest, comes this--" Standing there, Lilly was fighting an impulse to faint. She remembered, with terror, previous sensations, and fought off the vertigo, biting down into her lips. She wanted to smile, but her mouth felt numb, as if it dragged instead of lifted.