The lay of Page Avenue was before her, swollen through tears. Her mother sewing beside Katy Stutz. The patient back of her father's gray head. Her parents on their knees, far back there somewhere beside her bed of fever. Albert! Their wedding night when the door had closed behind them! "O God, make him take me! Please! "Far from the o-old folks--at ho--" "That will do." She stood with her mouth an O on the unfinished note, hand to the little rise of her bosom. "Meet me around in my office back stage." His voice was like a call in a fog, retreating and retreating. She followed it. They met in a narrow patch of broad daylight. "I'm afraid," she began, her voice breaking on a gulp--"I'm afraid I didn't--" "You did very well," he said, kindly. "Little off key and your voice won't set the world on fire, and it has a tremolo quality that may be rotten-bad singing, but it's the right stuff for the act." She thought, with a swoop of perception, that in this she discerned the astuteness of a buyer too clever to praise the article he covets. She felt lighter, as if some of her had melted in the ordeal. The machinery of her body began to take up again, the saliva to flow, and her heart to beat without seeming to hit its walls. "I'll try you out for a week. Twenty dollars?" "Yes." Trying to seem to pro and con. "Come to-morrow at ten and I'll have a man down to go over next week's slides with you. That gives you until Monday. Something pink on the order of what you are wearing will do, only fluffier. Rough up your hair a bit, too. No, leave it slick like that, but something fluffy in a hat or a sun-bonnet with a pink bow under the chin. Right there--under that little chin." Her head flew up from his touch. "I see." "Manage it?" "I think so." "You what?" "I know so." "Good. Never let a think show through your answer. Yes or no!" "Yes." He tweaked her chin again. "Watch out somebody doesn't steal you on your way home, big girl." "To-morrow at ten," she repeated, going out into the sunshine that smote her with the sting of hot lances. The tweak from his hand lay back somewhere, branded none too pleasantly into her consciousness. But just the same, when she inquired of a traffic policeman the direction to the Hotel Hudson, even the mundane wording of her asking clicked like happy castanets into her spirit. CHAPTER XVII And so it came about, through events of surprisingly simple shaping, that her first week in the metropolis found Lilly integral to it. She liked the consciousness that unless she appeared at the Union Family Theater at two-fifteen and at eight-fifteen she was breaking into the continuity of a sequence of events in which she had her place.