"Well, I hope some day to have the pleasure of hearing you sing. Are you in concert?" "Oh yes, concert." "I must watch for your name," digging down into a reticule for a bit of cardboard. "Mine is Towser--Mrs. Seymour Towser. What is yours?" "Mine? Lilly Penny," she replied, her whole body flashing to rescind the word no sooner than it was spoken. "Lilly-Penny-Parlow." They swayed their way through the chain of cars, Lilly's coach running two ahead of her companion's. "Well, good-by, Miss Parlow, I hope we meet again some day." "Good-by," said Lilly, making her way relievedly through two more cars of aisle. Once in her seat, she withdrew hastily from her valise a small red memorandum book, giltly inscribed "Mid-West Insurance Company," plying a quick and small chirography on to its first page: Pittman Building, Longacre Square. Hudson Hotel. The day, which for Lilly began with the tickle of aerial champagne, petered out humiliatingly. Quite without the precedent of the previous trip to Buffalo, Niagara Palls, and Chicago, train-sickness set in and the remainder of the day was spent hunched with her face to the prickly hot plush of the seat, her hair and linen suit awry, and not a spot on the pillow mercifully proffered by the porter that would remain cool to her cheek. It was well past nine o'clock, and two hours behind schedule, when a very limp and rumpled Lilly followed the weary straggle of weary passengers through the pale fog of the New Jersey station to the waiting ferry. She found a place at the very bow, and, standing there beside her bags, hat off to the sudden kiss of fresh air, her prostrated senses seemed to lift. There was something Trojan, Illiadic, in the way in which they moved out presently, to bay. The first tang of salt air, that rotten, indescribable smell of the sea, tickled her nostrils. It was all she could do to keep from being drunk with it. She felt skittish. She wanted to kick up. The approach was not spectacular. The great spangled flank of herself which New York turns to her harbor had just about died down, only a lighted tower jutting above the gauze of fog like a chateau perched on a mountain. Fog horns sent up rockets of dissonance. Peer as she would, Lilly could only discern ahead a festoon of lights each smeared a bit into the haze. She began her trick of dramatizing the moment. She wanted suddenly to claw apart the dimness with her finger nails. She wanted to lean into the beyond, to wind herself in that necklace of lights out there and bend back until she touched the floor of the universe. They slid into slip. Chains dropped. There was a sudden plunge forward. Night was day, white arc lights grilling into a vast black shed. A few automobiles and a line of horse cabs backed up against a curb--the one-horse variety that directly antedated the general use of the taxicab. A porter shoved her bags into one of these, the driver leaning an ear down off his box. "Where to, miss?"