She went to sleep right off with a little smile on her lips, as if the
picture had kissed it there, but it was many a day, sixteen years, in
fact, before she could be induced to enter the Metropolitan Opera House
again, and then only in the most crowded hour of her life.
CHAPTER V
Quite a friendship was thriving between Lilly and Mrs. Blair. The older
woman had opened the door to her upon that family skeleton, one of
which, by the way, lurks in the cupboards of most of us--the unproduced
play! This one, a sketch called "The Web," read by Lilly and even placed
by her with a written word of appreciation on Robert Visigoth's desk.
He carried it with him to Chicago, mailing it back one day without
comment.
"Just the same, there is a corking idea there. You ought to develop it
into a long play, Mrs. Blair."
"I will some day," she replied, with a cryptic something in her voice
that Lilly was only to understand a year later.
One spring evening, that year later, as she and Mrs. Blair sat in her
small room beside the open window that looked out over the twilighted
rear of housetops, Lilly was induced to sing, quietly, almost under her
breath, sitting there on the floor with her hands clasped about her
knees, her invariable shirt waist and dark-blue skirt discarded for a
pleasant sense of negligee in a pink cotton-crepe kimono, her hair
flowing with the swift sort of rush peculiar to it.
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