"Three-fifty and up."
"Yes—bath."
He shifted among his keys and she noticed that when she returned the pen to him his hand lingered just too long. She had a way of lifting her eyebrows to express her archest scorn. The smile on the clerk's face did not die, but neither did it widen.
She shot upward in an elevator. She padded her way through long hallways deeply carpeted to eat in footfalls. It seemed to her they must have rounded a city square of those hallways, door after door after door as imperturbable as eyeless masks, and yet which somehow seemed to look on.
"Anything else, ma'am?"
"Nothing." She interpreted his wait and felt for a ten-cent piece. He shifted the key to the room inside of the door and went out.
She was alone in a twelfth-story room that enhanced her aërial sense of light-headedness. She looked at the bed. Curly birch with a fine sense of depth to its whiteness. There was a glass top on the dresser, with a lace scarf beneath it which appealed to her sense of novelty. Also an extra light above it which she jerked on, peering at herself in the mirror.
There were soot rims about her eyes, and when she removed her hat her hair was glued to her brow in its outline. But just the same, the pollen that gave to her skin its velvetiness was there. She leaned to the mirror, baring her teeth to scan their whiteness; turned her profile as if to appraise its strong, sure cast; swelled her chest after the manner of inhaling for an octave, letting her hand ride on it. Then she undressed slowly, luxuriating in a deep hot bath that rested her as she lay back in it. She even washed her hair, wrapping it finally in one of the thick turkish towels, and then leaned out of her window for a while, her body well over the sill, and the air, with a cool washed quality to it, flowing through her nightdress. She looked down on what she thought must be the bosom of Broadway. Actually it was Forty-fourth Street. An ocean of roofs billowed under her gaze.
She thought of Tuefelsdröck alone with his stars. Or rather, wanted to think of herself as thinking of him.
A telephone directory on the desk caught her eye. For an hour she pored over its pages, names that had blazoned themselves incandescently from the pages of musical reviews and magazines mixed in casually with the clayey ones of mere persons. A thrill shot over her with each encounter. The book began to exhale an odor of sanctity.