When the cab stopped before his door, he paid the fare, torn between a certainty that his natural enemy, the chauffeur, was cheating him, and his desire to appear lordly before Madeline. Then, together, they began to get the stranger up the stairs.
The noise of the operation made Ritchie’s blood run cold. Suppose some one saw him with a drunken man and a girl? He hauled at the fellow’s arm in no very gentle manner.
At last, at the top of the house, he unlocked a door, and, supporting the stranger against the wall of the corridor, he brusquely said to Madeline:
“All right! You might as well go now.”
“I’d like to see him settled,” said she.
So Ritchie had to light the gas and had to let her in.
The room was a bleak, bare, cold little cell, with the exerciser fastened to the wall, and the window nailed open, to admit all the hygienically fresh air possible. On the bureau, instead of the little accessories of a fastidious gentleman, were a pair of military brushes, the vital library, all in a row, and a bottle of ink. On the table were an alarm clock and the apparatus of the correspondence course. There were no other visible articles personal to Ritchie, except a razor strop and six cakes of carbolic soap, economically unwrapped to dry.
He pushed the stranger down on his cot.
“All right!” he thought defiantly. “Now you can see just how I live—and I hope you’ll like it! Go on—laugh, if you want to!”
But she was not laughing.