At half after eight she was back once more in her room, changing from the tan linen into a pink mull, heavily inserted, too, and throwing up quite an aura of rosiness about her. She had only the tan hat, too wide and too floppy of brim, but it had a picturesque value, which is a greater selling quality than _chic_. In fact, in her own eyes, as she tilted the mirror for a full-length view, the art of Katy Stutz stood unimpeached. Eying her reflection in the mirrored walls of the elevator, she felt as pinkly blown as a rose, and looked it. A head or two turned after her youth. At the desk she inquired for the Pittman Building. Just opposite! A policeman held up traffic to let her cross. She picked a name off a third-story window, "Barnett Bureau--Musical Service," and rode up to it. By one of those astonishing flukes of beginner's good fortune, upon the occasion of this very first effort Lilly obtained. A ground-glass door opened into a room the size and bareness of a packing case and crammed to its capacity with a roller-top desk, a stenographer at a white-pine table, a cuspidor, a pair of shirt sleeves, a black mustache, and a blacker cigar. Entering, Lilly was surprised at the measured tempo of her voice and the manner in which she permitted her eyebrows to arch ever so superciliously. "I'm looking for an engagement," she said, speaking through the ticking of the typewriter. The jaw ate in half an inch more of cigar and swung around in the swivel. "Voice?" "Yes. High soprano." He ran a swift cocked eye over her points and turned to the white-pine table. "Send her down to Visigoth," he said to the stenographer, who took up where he left off. She was as blond and as bland as a summer's day. A Pompadour dipped down over one eye and her jaws moved as rhythmically as rigorously to gum with a pull to it. She was herself caricatured. She and Lilly exchanged that quickest of inventories, woman's for woman. "Sign here." Lilly signed. "Ten dollars." "Why?" "Our rules. Ten dollars a year bureau membership, and fifty per cent of first two weeks' salary." "But what if--" "We always place sooner or later." "But in case--" "Take this card down to the Union Family Theater, Union Square, and ask for Robert Visigoth. It's a two-a-day. If you don't do business with him, come back to-morrow morning." A quick dozen of questions rushed to Lilly's lips, but instead she laid down a new ten-dollar bill, crammed the slip into her palm through the hole in her glove, and went out, the snapping torrent of typewriting already resumed. The Union Family Theater was the first of a succession of variety houses that was to spread, first to Harlem, then Philadelphia, and later gird the country like a close-link chain. Vaudeville prefaced with stereopticon views, designed to appeal to the strict respectability of the most strictly respectable audiences in the world.