Star-Dust | Page 3

Nichols Fancy Grocery Supply
Company, his own horse and buggy furnished by the firm.
It was Mrs. Becker's habit during his day-long absence, in fact just as
soon as her acute ear detected the scraping departure of his tin-tired
wheels from the curb, to fling back these folding doors for the rush of
daylight and sense of space, often venturing in beside the front window
with a bit of sewing and pottering ever so discreetly at the sample
packages of fine teas, jars of perfectly conserved asparagus, peas, and
olives spread out on his mantelpiece and fingering, again ever so
discreetly, the neatly ripped stack of letters on the dresser. Once, and
despite Mrs. Becker's frantic swoop to save it, a piece of pressed flower
fell out from one of these envelopes in the handling, crumbling to bits
as it fluttered to the floor.
Next morning the folding doors refused to part to touch, an eye to the

keyhole discovering it clogged with key. Then Lilly began music
lessons and the newly rented upright piano was drawn up against these
doors.
Never were fingers more recalcitrant at musical chores. The Bach
"Inventions" were weary digital gyrations against the slow-moving
hands of the alarm clock perched directly in her line of vision. Czerny,
too, was punctuated with quick little forays between notes, into a paper
bag of "baby pretzels" at the treble end of the piano, often as not
lopping over on the keyboard.
But with the plunge into brilliant but faulty execution of one of her
"pieces," her little face would flood over and tighten up into the glyptic
immobility of a cameo and her toes curl as they pressed the pedals.
"The Storm King" of the Parlor Pianoforte Series was a favorite.
Dashing her quickly memorized way through it, she would follow
closely the brief printed synopsis on the cover page ... suddenly the
clouds gather, a bird carols, a faint rumble is heard in the distance (it
is important that the student practice this base tremolo with left hand
only), the rush of approaching wind mingles with the nearing roll of
thunder, accompanied by occasional flashes of lightning....
The red would run up into Lilly's face and her hands churn the white
keys into a curdled froth of dissonance.
"Lil-ly, not so fast. Play 'Selections from Faust' now, slowly, and count,
the way Miss Lee said you should."
Another favorite was the just published "Narcissus" of Nevin. Its
cross-hand movement was a phillipic to her ever-ready-to-ferment
fancy. Head back and gaze into the scroll-and-silk front of the piano,
the melody would again, like a curve of gold, shape itself into the
lovely form of a proscenium arch.
"Lilly, that is beautiful. Play the tune part over again."
The tingling that would actually gooseflesh her would die down as

surely as a ringing crystal tumbler, had she closed her warm little hand
over it.
"Mamma," her voice directed upward toward the open register, "can
I--may I go out on my tricycle?"
"No."
"I've only ten minutes yet, mamma. I'll make them up to-morrow."
"No, I don't intend to pay Miss Lee fifty cents a lesson so you can go
out and ride on your tricycle. You bothered me for the lessons, so now
you practice. Work on 'Narcissus' so you can play it for your father
to-night."
"Oh, mom, please."
"I don't care. Go! Only put on your hat and don't let me see you riding
around on Taylor Avenue."
"No'm."
CHAPTER III
The St. Louis of Lilly's little girlhood, sprung so thrivingly from the left
bank of the Mississippi and builded on the dead mounds of a dead past,
was even then inexplicably turning its back to its fine river frontage;
stretching in the form of a great adolescent giant, prone, legs flung to
the west and full of growing pains, arms outstretched and curving
downward in a great north-and-south yawn.
Taylor Avenue (then almost the city's edge, and which now is a girdle
worn high about its gigantic middle) petered out into violently muddy
and unmade streets and great patches of unimproved vacant lots that in
winter were gaunt with husks.
A pantechnicon procession of the more daring, shot with the growing
pains, was grading and building into the vast clayey seas west of

Kings-highway, but for the most part St. Louis contained herself
gregariously enough within her limits, content in those years when the
country rang hollowly to the cracked ring of free silver to huddle under
the same blanket with her smoke-belching industries.
A picture postcard of a brewery, piled high like a castle and with
stables of Augean collosity, rose from the south tip of the city to the
sour-malt supremacy of the world; boots, shoes, tobacco, and street cars
bringing up by a nose, Eads Bridge,