"Who Did It?" as it was re-renamed, settled down to a run of forty-three
New York weeks, and along the Rialto the source of its authorship leaked
out and became curbstone, and finally newspaper, patter.
At the end of six months Ida Blair had resigned her bookkeepership,
erected a small but perfect plinth of blue granite in a certain hillside
cemetery, purchased a story-and-a-half bungalow in the heart of two Long
Island acres, and was raising leghorns and educating a niece
by marriage.
For the forty-three metropolitan weeks, not to mention stock, foreign,
motion pictures, and road incomes that were to accrue later, Lilly was
receiving her share, never less than one hundred and twenty-five dollars
a week and often considerably more.
It was a windfall pure and simple. The years of petty pickering suddenly
seemed more horrid to her in retrospect than she had ever realized they
were in the living. It was hateful to have reckoned in car fares and to
so often have appeared to do the niggardly thing before the unspoken
reproach of her child.
That same winter a cashier's note with her weekly check announced a
thirty-three and a third per cent advance in salary.
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