As I stood there, smiling over this discovery, a figure in black rustled down the narrow stairway and edged past us in the half-lit hall.
The light fell full on her face as she opened the door to the street. It outlined her figure, as thin as that of a medieval saint from a missal. It was the young woman I had followed from Madison Square.
Of this I was certain—from the moment the light fell on her thin-cheeked face, where anxiety seemed to have pointed the soft oval of the chin into something mask-like in its sharpness. About her, quite beyond the fact that her eyes were the most unhappy eyes I had ever seen, hung a muffled air of tragedy, the air of a spirit both bewildered and baffled. But I could see that she was, or that she had been, a rather beautiful young woman, though still again the slenderness of the figure made me think of a saint from a missal.
I was still thinking of her as I followed the sullen and slatternly servant up the dark stairs. Once in my new quarters, I glanced absently about at the sulphur-yellow wallpaper and the melancholy antiquities that masqueraded as furniture. Then I came back to the issue at hand.
"Who is that young woman in black who happened to pass us in the hall?" I casually inquired.
"Can that!" was the apathetic and quite enigmatic retort of the bare-armed girl. I turned to inquire the meaning of this obvious colloquialism.
"Aw, cage the zooin' bug!" said my new-found and cynical young friend. "She ain't that kind."
"What is she?" I asked, as I slipped a bill into the startled and somewhat incredulous hand of toil. The transformation was immediate.
"She ain't nothin'!" was the answer. "She's just a four-flush, an also-ran! And unless she squares wit' the madam by Sat'rday she's goin' to do her washin' in somebody else's bath-tub!"
Through this sordid quartz of callousness ran one silver streak of luck. It was plain that I was to be on the same floor with the girl in black. And that discovery seemed quite enough.