Star-Dust

Fannie Hurst
Star-Dust, by Fannie Hurst

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Title: Star-Dust
Author: Fannie Hurst
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[Illustration: "HER BLOOD WAS POUNDING AND HER VOICE
WAS IN FLIGHT"]
STAR-DUST
A Story of an American Girl
BY FANNIE HURST
1921

Book One
THE VINE
Oh, the little more and how much it is: And the little less, and what
worlds away. --BROWNING.
[Greek: Zoae]
CHAPTER I
When Lilly Becker eked out with one hand that most indomitable of

pianoforte selections, Rubinstein's "Melody in F," her young mind had
a habit of transcending itself into some such illusory realm as this:
Springtime seen lacily through a phantasmagoria of song. A very floral
sward. Fountains that tossed up coloratura bubbles of sheerest aria and
a sort of Greek frieze of youth attitudinized toward herself.
This frieze was almost invariably composed of Estelle Foote, a
successful rival in a class candidacy for the sponge-and-basin
monitorship; Sydney Prothero, infallible of spitball aim; Miss Lare with
her spectacles very low on her nose and a powdering of chalk dust
down her black alpaca; Flora Kemble with infinitely fewer friendship
bangles on her silver link bracelet; Roy Kemble, kissing her yellow,
rather than yanking her brown, braids.
And then suddenly, apropos of nothing except the sweet ache of Lilly's
little soul, the second movement would freeze itself into a proscenium
arch of music, herself, like a stalagmite, its slim center.
At this point, "Melody in F" veils itself in a mist of arpeggios, and Mrs.
Becker, who invariably, during the after-school practice hour, sat
upstairs with Mrs. Kemble in her sunny second-story back, would call
down through the purposely opened floor register.
"Lilly, not so fast on that part."
"Yes'm."
Were it not that the salient spots, the platform places in experience, are
floored over in little more or less identical mosaics of all the
commonplace day by days, Lilly Becker, at the rented-by-the-month
piano in her parents' back parlor in Mrs. Schum's boarding house, her
two chestnut braids rather precociously long and thick down her back,
her mother rocking rhythmically overhead, were spurious to this
narrative.
Yet how much more potently than by the mere exposition of it and
because you have looked in on the nine-year-old chemistry of a vocal
and blond dream in the dreaming, are you to know the Lilly of

seventeen, who secretly and unsuccessfully washed her hair in a
solution of peroxide, and at eighteen, through the patent device of a
megaphone inserted through a plate-glass window, was singing to--But
anon.
There was a game Lilly used to play on the front stairs of Mrs. Schum's
boarding house, winter evenings after dinner. She and Lester Eli, who,
at seventeen, was to drown in a pleasure canoe; Snow
Horton--clandestinely present--daughter of a neighborhood dentist and
forbidden to play with the "boarding-house children"; Flora and Roy
Kemble, twins; and little Harry Calvert, who would creep up like a
dirty little white mouse from the basement kitchen.
"C"--hissed sibilantly.
"Can't carry cranky cats!"
"No fair, Snow; that doesn't make sense."
"Does."
"Your turn, Roy."
"Z."
"No fair. Nothing begins with 'Z.'"
LILLY: "Does so. Z! Z--zounds--zippy--zingorella--zoe! Zoe!"
By similar strain of alliterative classification, Mrs. Schum's boarding
house might have been indexed as Middle West, middle class, medium
price, and meager of meal.
Poor, callous-footed Mrs. Schum, with her spotted bombazine bosom
and her loosely anchored knob of gray hair! She was the color of cold
dish water at that horrid moment when the grease begins to float, her
hands were corroded with it, and her smile somehow could catch you
by the heartstrings, which smiles have no
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