Busy at the mannerism, if not the act, of twirling that hirsute adornment of upper lip, he continued to observe Lilly. "You understand? What I need is a real heart-to-heart voice." "I'm quite good at ballads." "Quite good or darn good?" "Darn." "Experience?" "I'm just in from as far west as--Dallas." "Now what I want is a turn that hasn't struck the West yet. Understand? It originated right here in this theater. There is a firm of music publishers in this town makes up slides of its songs, and all you have to do is stand beside the screen and sing to the stereopticon illustrations. Understand? You don't have to follow the pictures. The pictures follow you. It is sure fire if it is handled right, only the girl we had on last week must have wrapped her vocal cords in sandpaper. The secret of the whole thing is to make them--out there--live the song. Understand?" "I see." "Every woman in the audience has to be the sweetheart and every man the lover you are singing to them about. And to do that the first one to live that song must be you. Believe in yourself before you expect the world to. If you come in here and tell me you sing _quite_ good, it won't be easy to convince me of more if you begin to warble like Melba. Now you go up there and let me hear a bar or two. Take care of the last row gallery and the first row orchestra will take care of itself. Shoot!" "I--haven't my music with me--my repertoire--" "Nonsense! Just a bar or two--'Suwanee River'--anything with heart in it. Give us some lights up there, Bob." Through the blackness Lilly moved as if she were sleep-walking in it. Little needles of nervousness were out all over her, and, absurdly enough, there walked across her vision the utterly irrelevant spectacle of old black Willie with her feet bound in gunny sacks and the pencil nubs in her hair, and just as irrelevantly her mind began to pop with a little explosive ejaculative prayer: "O God, make him take me! O God, make him take me!" The bunch light had been dragged down center stage. She stood beside it, opening her mouth as if to muster voice, then closing it. It was as if water were swirling around and around her, the unseen presence in the back of the house surging at her like a multitude. "Shoot!" She looked appealingly in the direction of the hammering down of the seats. "Never mind that. Sing to the top row of the gallery." A fearful recurrence of yesterday's train-sickness rushed over her; she could have crumpled to her knees, had even a sense of wanting to faint, but instead she opened her lips again, her eyes fixed on the unseen last two tows of the unseen top gallery, and by miracle finding a pitch that left her plenty of range. "Way down upon the Suwanee River-" "Louder!" "Far, far away, There's where my heart is turning ever, There's where the old folks stay. All the world am sad and dreary, Everywhere I roam. Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary--"