A sob stuck in her throat, and, crossing to the window, she raised it and threw back the shutters, letting in a thin stream of dust and sunshine. Her geranium stood where she had left it, and its withered and yellow leaves smote her with accusing neglect.
"Oh, you poor thing!" she cried, in an impulsive burst of pity.
Then she saw that it had been freshly watered, and that its famished leaves were unfolding. Turning her eyes, they encountered a row of small pots containing seedlings which lined her neighbor's window, encroaching slightly upon her own possession. Before them a man was standing, a watering-can in one hand, a small trowel in the other. As Mariana stepped upon the fire-escape he turned in evident resentment, glanced at her indifferently, and resumed his task of invigoration.
The afternoon sun shone full upon him, and Mariana saw him plainly. He was young, with stooping shoulders, and he wore a cheap and shabby suit of clothes, with apparent disregard of their quality. His face was thin and cleanly shaven, there was a nervous tension about the mouth, and the hair, falling dark and heavy upon the temples, lent a haggardness to his colorless and burned-out profile. It was a face in which the poetic principle was obscured by an ascetic veneering. In his whole appearance was borne out the suggestion flashing from the eyes—a suggestion of mental sustentation upon physical force.
Mariana regarded him mutely. Her gaze was almost tragic in its intensity. For a moment her lips quivered and her fingers interlaced. Then she retreated into her room, slamming the shutters after her. Throwing herself into a chair, she buried her face in her hands.
"I—I can't have even that to myself!" she said, and burst into tears.
CHAPTER IV
Mariana's neighbor sat in his room. He sat motionless, his head resting upon his hands, his arms resting upon an office desk, which was plainly finished and of cheap walnut. At his left elbow a lamp cast an illumination upon his relaxed and exhausted figure, upon the straight, dark hair, upon the bulging brow, and upon the sinewy and squarely shaped hands, with their thin and nervous fingers.
The desk upon which he leaned was covered with a litter of closely written letter-sheets, and at the back a row of pigeon-holes contained an unassorted profusion of manuscripts.
The walls of the room were lined with roughly constructed shelves of painted wood, which were filled to overflowing with well-worn volumes in English, French, and German, Oken's Die Zeugung upon the north side confronting Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication upon the south. A cabinet in one corner contained a number of alcoholic specimens of embryonic development, and a small table near by supported a microscope and several instruments for physiological experiments. Above the mantel, perhaps arranged in freakish disregard of superstition, hung a skull and a pair of cross-bones, and beneath them a series of photographs illustrating the evolution of rudimentary nervous systems.