“Stealin'!” repeated Mrs. Hinkley. “That's what it is, nothin' else but stealin'. You don't ever stop to think when you use one of them gas plates to cook in your room, Mr. Gooley—which it is expressly forbid and agreed on that no cooking shall be done in these rooms when they're rented to you—that it's my gas you're using, and that I have to pay for it, and that it's just as much stealin' as if you was to put your hand into my pocket-book and take my money!”
“Cooking? Gas plate?” muttered Mr. Gooley. “Don't say you ain't got one!” cried Mrs. Hinkley. “You all got 'em! Every last one of you! Don't you try to come none of your sweet innocence dodges over me. I know you, and the whole tribe of you! I ain't kept lodgers for thirty years without knowing the kind of people they be! 'Gas plate! Gas plate!' says you, as innocent as if you didn't know what a gas plate was! You got it hid here somewheres, and I ain't going to stir from this room until I get my hands on it and squash it under my feet! Come across with it, Mr. Gooley, come across with it!”
“But I haven't one,” said Mr. Gooley, very ill and very weary. “You can look, if you want to.”
And he lay back upon the bed. The cockroach slyly withdrew himself from the ceiling, came down the wall, and crawled to the foot of the bed again. If Mrs. Hinkley noticed him, she said nothing; perhaps it was not a part of her professional policy to draw attention to cockroaches on the premises. She stood and regarded Mr. Gooley for some moments, while he turned his head away from her in apathy. Her first anger seemed to have spent itself. But finally, with a new resolution, she said: “And look I will! You got one, or else that blondined party in the next room has lied.”
She went into the closet and he heard her opening his trunk. She pulled it into the bedroom and examined the interior. It didn't take long. She dived under the bed and drew out his battered suitcase, so dilapidated that he had not been able to get a quarter for it at the pawnshop, but no more dilapidated than his trunk.
She seemed struck, for the first time since her entrance, with the utter bareness of the room. Outside of the bed, one chair, the bureau, and Mr. Cooley's broken shoes at the foot of the bed, there was absolutely nothing in it.
She sat down in the chair beside the bed. “Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you ain't got any gas plate.”
“No,” he said.
“Mr. Gooley,” she said, “you got nothing at all.
“No,” he said, “nothing.”