"I'm from the agency," she said at once, the little beating quality that she was feeling all over her in her voice, and holding out the slip. "Come out here," he said, "where I can see you." Some daylight flowed in through a slightly open fire exit and she caught at a last moment of darkness to straighten her hat. "Sing?" "Yes." He shoved open the iron door so that more light flowed over her. "Why," he said, "you're a big girl, aren't you?" "I don't know," she said, through a little laugh of embarrassment, and noticing that, regarding her, he wetted his lips. "That part's all right. What I need is a good refined ballad voice. Understand? The kind that can sing 'The Suwanee River' as if the only thing in the world that mattered is that old plantation down there. Understand?" "I see." He spoke through a slight patois, New-Yorkese, but which she misjudged for Virginian. He was in inverse ratio to her stock idea of theatrical manager. Both brothers were to become more and more subject to this soft indictment. Born in one of those old morose houses in lower Lexington Avenue, each had lived there until he obtained his degree of LL.D. from a state university. It had been a sedate, a mildly prosperous, even an historic home. A Vice President of the United States had once owned it. Then a Major O. Higginbothom, and finally, for fifteen years of tenancy, the Visigoths. One of the kind whose genteel hall light had burned through the fanlight decade after decade, and then suddenly, overnight, as it were, disintegrated into a furnished-room house with a sign over the door bell. One evening Horace R. Visigoth, of the law firm of Visigoth, Visigoth & Higginbothom, did not answer his wife's soft question to him across the green-shaded reading lamp of their library table. His head was quite sunk forward in a sheaf of proofs. He was dead. One month later his wife failed to awaken to Pauline Visigoth's frenzied attempts or to even a dexterous physician's respiratory methods. The year following Pauline Visigoth married the dexterous physician and moved to Chicago. The Lexington Avenue house succumbed to a quick sale, and in attempting to divert the law business out of the clayey rut of quiet old conservatism, the Enterprise Amusement Company was ultimately to be born. Robert Visigoth, twenty-nine at the time, betrayed little of the heritage his name suggested. His Teutonic blood pretty well laid, he was a trifle too short and a trifle too heavy, and with none of his mother's lean patrician quality to which both his younger brother and older sister had fallen heir. Suggesting future rotundities and a reddishness of complexion that was presently to purple, at this stage his chin was undoubted and as square as a spade, and, as so often happens to chins of this potentiality, punctuated absurdly with a dimple, and he wore a little clipped edge of black mustache which he tried to twirl.