Star-Dust | Page 7

they etched
their way at all into Mr. Becker's patient kind of equanimity, the utter
quietude of his personality, which could efface itself behind a
newspaper for two or even three hours at a time, never revealed it. His
was the stolidity of an oak, tickled rather than assailed by a bright-eyed
woodpecker.
"Little woman" he liked to call her in his nearest approach of

endearment, although it must have been her petite quickness rather than
a diminutive quality that earned the appellation. Even when he had
wooed her in Granite City, Missouri, and she had sung down at the
quiet-faced youth from a choir loft, she was after the then prevalent
form of hourglass girlish loveliness. Now she was rather enormous of
bust, proudly so, and wore her waist pulled in so that her hips sprang
out roundly. A common gesture was to place her hands on her hips,
press down, and breathe sharply inward, thus holding herself for the
moment from the steel walls of her corsets. Their removal immediately
after dinner was a ritual to be anticipated during the day. She would sit
in her underbodice, unhooked of them, sunk softly into herself, her
hands stroking her tortured jacket of ribs and her breath flowing deeper.
"I don't believe I'd pull in quite so tight, Carrie, if I were you. It will tell
on your health some day."
"You don't catch me with a sloppy figure. I don't give a row of pins for
the woman without some curve to her."
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 matinée 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.
"Looks more like her father, if she looks like either of them," Mrs.
Schum was fond of saying, "and she has his easy disposition. But there
is a child who runs deep. If she was mine I'd educate her to be
something. Ah me, if only my Annie hadn't lost her head and married,
she had the makings, too."
As a matter of fact, Lilly's resemblance to her parents stopped abruptly.
Her first year in High School, a course in natural science revealed to
her the term "botanical sport."
"That's what I am," she determined, with youth's immediate application
of cosmos to self, "a botanical sport." A spontaneous variation from the
normal type. "Papa, I learned to-day that I'm a sport."
MRS. BECKER: "A what? That is a genteel expression for a young girl
to apply to herself! That High School does you more harm than good."
"But, mamma, it's a term used in botany. A term from Darwin."
"Darwin! That's a fine thing to teach children in school--that they come
from monkeys! No wonder children haven't any respect for their
parents nowadays."
"Well, just the same it is in the biology. We're on frogs now. You ought
to see the way frogs get born!"
"In my day children weren't taught such stuff. I'm surprised, Ben, it's
allowed."
Across the biology of life, as if to shut out the loathsome facts of an
abattoir, a curtain of dreadful portent was drawn before Lilly's clear
eyes.
"When baby came," was Mrs. Becker's insinuation for the naked and
impolite fact of birth.
In a vague, inchoate sort of way, Lilly at sixteen was visualizing nature

procreant as an abominable woman creature standing shank deep in
spongy swampland and from behind that portentous curtain moaning in
the agonized key of Mrs. Kemble.
About this time Mrs. Kemble's third child was within a few weeks of
birth.
"Mamma, what makes Mrs. Kemble look so funny!"
"Hush, Lilly. Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again. Little
girls shouldn't ask such questions."
One night shortly after, a cry that tore like a gash through the