“Not to-night, thank you. I must be getting back.”
“I’ll go with you as far as Bleecker Street. It’s on my way to the East Side joint to meet my burglar,” she agreed, and we turned toward Washington Square.
“Have you written many stories about crooks?” I inquired, for, though she always spoke of herself as an author and of everything she did, even the tea-room she was planning, as a means of getting material for her “real work,” she had never mentioned the names of her stories.
“Not yet.” She panted so vigorously and her eyes shone so eagerly that I was sure of having touched a subject she liked. “You see I specialize on one type at a time. My last before taking up crooks was newsboys.”
“You wrote a newsboy story?”
“Newsboys who had made a fortune of one hundred thousand dollars and over. It was colossal. The editor told a friend of mine that it was the greatest spread that ever appeared in ——”
“Spread?” I interrupted. “I thought you said you wrote short stories.”
“Story-writing as you understand it is a dead art,” she assured me solemnly. “Pictures! The future of the picture story is colossal.”
That night before I fell asleep for the first time in my new quarters, I decided that Hildegarde was not one who would understand my determination to live in the tenements. I never confided in her.
During the months that followed, working day after day in the tenements, from eight-thirty in the morning to five of an afternoon, I never lost sight of that determination. Having decided to sublet a small furnished flat, I was continually on the lookout for it. Before I finally found such a flat, Miss O’Brien had demanded my room.