"How far is it?" asked Albert, speaking for the first time. "Why, I guess it ought to take about ten minutes from here," replied Lilly, grateful for the question and trying to meet his averted glance. He withdrew quite a disk of silver watch, reading it carefully. "We're already on the way seven and a quarter minutes," he said. "Albert," she began, "there is something I want to--ought to--tell you--first--" "Albert, close that window next to you." "I--don't quite know--how to begin--" "Close it all the way, Albert, you're still in a draught." Suddenly Lilly sat back, silent holding her father's hand the rest of the way. But no sooner were the three of them safely into the little front room than, without even seating them, she rushed out to forestall Zoe. But too late. That young lady herself had already appeared between the curtains of the alcove. She had done the outlandish, the outrageous, the irrelevant thing. An old red rep portiere wound tightly around her body to below the armpits, and held there by skillfully adjusted bands of black velvet, a fillet of the same so low that it touched her eyebrows secured about her boxed and brilliantly blond hair, she held the half-profile pose of a Carmencita, a pair of ten-cent-store black earrings dangling and her upflung gesture one of defiance, mischief with an unmistakable dash of irrepressible dramatics. In a silence that shaped itself to a grin, Lilly, caught midstep as it were, stood regarding her daughter. She wanted to scream, to throw back her head and shout her hysteria, to spank her daughter bodily there across her knees, and more than that she wanted to laugh! Enormous laughter, to allay her sense of madness. Instead she found voice, which, when it came, was not her own, for thinness. "Albert," she said, "this is your daughter--Zoe." "Ben," whispered Mrs. Becker, out of a fantastic cave of silence and rising suddenly from her chair to plant herself on the overstuffed divan, where there was more horizontal room--"Ben, I think I'm going to faint." And she did. CHAPTER IX Yet within a week Mrs. Becker, through all the fog of her bewilderment, was embroidering seed pearls on her granddaughter's white graduation slippers. Forty years of dogged loyalty to the white string ties, fresh every day, had gone down before seventeen's mandate; and to Ben Becker's unspeakable sheepishness, he had appeared one evening in an impeccable dark-blue knitted cravat, his collar, of cut heretofore easily inclusive of chin, snugger to his neck, and flowing out to slight points. "So you let her bamboozle you into something I couldn't accomplish in thirty-eight years," was Mrs. Becker's sole comment through a mouthful of seed pearls. "Nonsense! The child has ideas. These collars don't dig in." "Humph! She's had you around her little finger from the start." "Now, Carrie, why do you say that?" "Because it's true," trying not to smile. It was.