“No, I didn’t mean that,” he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish
stubble of his muscular jaws. “But I know he’s cleaner than I am.”
“That I don’t doubt!” Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,
and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe
close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar was
frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door and
to his own bed in the corner among the bones.
Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and
coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had
washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar’s sponge, it was quite
possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The
playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who
occupied the front apartment,—but he, as he admitted, “was usually
pye-eyed, when he wasn’t in Buffalo.” He went home to Buffalo sometimes
to rest his nerves.
It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub
after Caesar;—but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned
for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized
the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub
that any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left
cigarette ends on the moulding.
All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get back
at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When he
heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly into
the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.
“I don’t wish to be exigent, Miss,”—he had certain grand words that he
used upon occasion—“but if this is your trunk, it’s rather in the way
here.”
“Oh, very well!” she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her
handbag. “I’ll have it moved when I can get a man to do it,” and she went
down the hall with her free, roving stride.
Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left on
the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.
III
In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room
from Miss Bower’s, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on
hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closet
door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, and
he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat.
Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothes
and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court. The closet
was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoon
he set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of forgotten
laundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as his middle
when he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and overshoes
together. When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition,
a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure,—a knot hole,
evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room. He had never
noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped
