Star-Dust Part 68

"You mean you don't see it, either?"

"But you do."

"But--"

"No 'buts.' She goes into rehearsal for a spring try-out in Baltimore, Stamford, or any of the dog towns. I'm giving the ma.n.u.script to Forbes to read this week. He's the man to direct that type of thing. I'm going to throw in ten or twenty thousand on your judgment."

"You're serious?" He held out his lean hand. "Ill send for Ida Blair."

"No--please!"

"Why?"

"Sit down."

She did, biting back excitement.

"I don't know how to talk to that little woman. She depresses me. This is your venture and mine."

"But her play! Its production will mean her resurrection. Her monument to a memory. Her protest. A chance to get her on her feet. An opportunity for a home, a background, a reason for living to a woman who has lost every reason. It's her play and her chance."

"And it is our venture."

"I'm not afraid."

"Are we partners, then?"

"If I had the money, yes, to my limit."

"I don't mean that."

"I do."

"All right; go your limit."

"My limit? How far would six one-hundred-dollar munic.i.p.al bonds and--"

"Good. I'll sell you six per cent of a twenty-thousand-dollar venture for the six hundred."

"Six--percent--twenty--thousand--Why, that's not a man-to-man proposition! You're treating me like a child."

"All right, then; three per cent for the six hundred."

"Done! But no nonsense. If I lose, I lose. Man to man."

"'Man to man,'" he said, clasping her hand and drinking down deep into her gaze.

And so, when she hurried out to the high ledge to which Ida Blair's figure had somehow shaped itself as the years went on, she stood for a moment to steady the hand she placed on that shoulder.

"Ida!" The older woman raised her eyes of the peculiarly washed quality of gray that has faded from repeated scaldings in hot water. "Mr.

Visigoth wants you in his office, dear--now."

She kept her voice out of quaver, but it had a singing quality like a plucked violin string.

CHAPTER IV

As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her daughter, toward a subject about which she knew nothing, but, in an inchoate way, felt a great deal.

The New York State fight for woman's suffrage had not yet reached its victorious culmination, and, reading announcement of a great parade up Fifth Avenue for a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, she took Zoe.

The smell of spring was dancingly out. Shop windows bloomed with the millinery of May. Open street cars, open skies, and openwork shirt waists had arrived.

They climbed the flank of an omnibus and rode down to the Washington Arch in a midair snapping with bunting.

It was on one of those irresistible afternoons--radiant with the sun-washed geometry of three architectural renaissances, a monastic-fronted fur emporium, a Parthenon of a library, a Doric-columned bank--that Lilly and Zoe lumbered their omnibus way through the daily carnival of the most rococo avenue in the world.

There was the flare of a sea gull to Zoe--no containing her. Little s.n.a.t.c.hes of song bubbled. She was a freshet of delight.

"Look at that tray of violets, Lilly! I must have a bunch."

"Zoe, don't lean over so far!"

"See the yellow satin in that shop window, Lilly! I'd love to wind it round me. It's like sun!"

"See those jams of women in white, Zoe, waiting to form into line!"

"I'd love to march!"

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know, there--there's something sort of onward about it."

"Exactly! Onward! Forward! March!"

With a precocity that never ceased to amuse and delight Lilly, Zoe, while only half understanding the content of an occasion, could somehow imbibe its essence. She leaned now over the rail of the omnibus, the cross-town streets, as they jogged past, already colloid ma.s.ses of women waiting to fall into line.

"Isn't it queer, Lilly, that after all these centuries and centuries women are just beginning to--what did that woman on the program call it down at Cooper Union hall the other night--function in the government?

Why has it taken them so long to ask for their half in the say-so of things?"

"Any great movement, Zoe, must have very slow beginnings. Think for what ages man lived without Christianity!"

"Yes; but look how long it has been here."

"Reckoning in geology, Zoe, and compared with the age of mountains and oceans, two thousand years isn't long."

"I think it is."