"A ten-months-old daughter furnishes me all the music I have time for. Didn't I read where you got married, Lilly?" "Yes. You had such a pretty touch on the piano, Vera." "Why, I don't believe I've opened the piano in six months! Marriage knocks it out of you pretty quick, don't it? And, say, wait until the babies begin to come. I said to him last night, 'Ed, why is marriage like quicksands?' He's no good at conundrums. 'Because it sucks you down,' I said, and he didn't even see the point. But it's a fact, isn't it? Mine is city salesman for the Mound City Shoe Company. What's yours?" "With Slocum-Hines." "Lucille Wright is married. And remember Edna Ponscarme? Twins. Nine months to a day. Maybe she wasn't in a hurry! And Stella Loire, the class beauty? She wheels her past our house on her way to market every morning. More like the class dishrag now. Well, well! it does seem funny. Lilly Becker married and settled down like the rest of us, and we had you down in the class prophecy for a famous opera singer. Well, well!" At Eighteenth Street Lilly left the car, transferring for Union Station. A sudden exultation was racing through her. She sat well forward on her seat, as if that could quicken transit. Union Station, one of the first of those dividend-built and dividend-building terminals that were to spring up quickly and palatially the country over, rose with a peculiarly American trick out of one of the most squalid sections of the city. Fifteen railroads threaded into it, a gaseous shed _de luxe_, picking up St. Louis like a gigantic bead upon the necklace of commerce. The coughing of steam up against a glass roof threw off repetitions of self. The boom of a train announcer's voice rang out, the echoes fitting smaller and smaller into one another like a collapsible drinking cup. A hither and thither! A bustle that caught Lilly up into it. She was immediately drunk with the moment and train smoke. Life was a gigantic drum, beating. The clerk at the Terminal Hotel, Mrs. Kemble's brother-in-law, in fact, cashed her check for her, without question, but a sort of unspoken askance, sending it across the street, with his additional indorsement, to a bank. There were six one-hundred-dollar bills, two fifties, and five tens. She folded their considerable bulk into the bag around her neck. True to direction, the checks for her bags had been left at the Information Desk in an addressed envelope. A porter scurried for them. Backed by the precedent of the trip to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Chicago, she bought her ticket, and then, rather more reluctantly and against her sense of thrift, a berth, which already necessitated a foray into the little chamois bag. Last, she dropped an already stamped and addressed envelope into the station mail box, her heart seeming to swoon to her feet as she did so. It contained a half-hundredth version of a week-old letter finally reduced to: