Star-Dust | Page 7

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 sleeping boarding house roused Lilly to a sitting posture on her little cot drawn across the baseboard of her parents' bed.
"Mamma! Papa! What was that?"
There were immediate voices and running up and down stairs and more cries that beat the air and Mrs. Becker already up and clamoring into her kimono.
"Sh-h-h, Lilly! Go back to sleep. It is nothing but Mrs. Kemble not feeling very well. I'll run upstairs a minute, Ben. See that Lilly goes back to sleep."
Until the break of day Lilly lay tense there on her little cot, toes curled in, and still her mother did not return. Time and time again the moans rose to shrieks of dreadful supplication that set her to trembling so that her cot rattled against the baseboard.
"Kill me! God! Put me out of it! Please! I can't suffer any more! Kill me, God! Kill me!"
"Papa, I--I'm scared."
"Go to sleep, Lilly," said her father from the pool of darkness, his voice rather thin and sick. "Go to sleep now, like a good girl."
In a little area of quiet that ensued, she did drop healthily off, wakening to the warmth of sunshine, her father already departed, her mother rocking and sewing beside the window.
"Mamma, why didn't you wake me? I'll be late to school."
"You won't if you hurry and--and, Lilly, what do you think?"
"What, mamma?"
"The stork brought Flora and Roy the dearest little baby sister last night. They're going