"
To Mrs. Becker a row of pins was the basest coinage of any realm. It ran
through her speech in pricking idiom.
She was piquant enough of face, quick-eyed, and with little pointy
features enhanced by a psyche worn as emphatically as an exclamation
point on the very top of her head. On eucher or matinee days her bangs,
at the application of a curling iron, were worn frizzed, but usually
they were pinned back beneath the psyche in straight brown wisps.
As she grew older, Lilly came more and more to resemble her father in a
certain tight knit of figure, length of limb, and quiet gray eyes that
could fill blackly with pupil and in the smooth, straight, always
gleaming brown hair growing cleanly and with the merest of widows' peaks
off her forehead.
At fourteen she stood shoulder to shoulder with her mother, and their
gloves and shirt waists were interchangeable. One really distinguishing
loveliness was her complexion. The skin flowed over her body with the
cool fleshliness of a pink rose petal. There was a natural shimmer to
it, a dewiness and a pollen of youth that enveloped her like a caress.
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