“No,” laughed Jim. “That’s in case of fire. I ought to have changed that water two weeks ago, but I guess I’m getting lazy.”
By this time I had my coat off and had accepted Jim’s invitation to wash the train dust off my face.
For this purpose I scraped around in the soap dish until I had secured two thin wafers of soap, one a transparent reminder of perfumed toilet soap, the other a dull yellow, and odorous with naphtha, which I recognized as the remnant of a powerful disinfecting and wash-day soap; used by my Aunt to drive black oil from overalls. I had to rub these two antagonistic wafers together to make sufficient lather for washing. Then, too, I had to hurry my toilet, for the flowered wash bowl had a yellow crack on its under side, through which the water dripped rapidly while I washed.
Jim said,
“Until you get some, Al, you must use my towel.” He took it down from the wire behind the stove and let me have it, with the remark:
“There’s a dry corner, there near the fringe.”
The window was open, and while I was busy brushing the dust from my clothes, a gust of wind came in and I heard a rip on the wall followed by an exclamation from Jim,
“There it goes again! The wall will be going next!”
On examination I found that the wall paper, with its highly conventionalized lotus leaves, had lost its grip on the wall behind the gas stove and had uncovered a great area of plastered wall. Jim produced some tacks, and using a flat-iron for a hammer managed to return the paper to its place and to keep it anchored there through a liberal use of tacks.
He apologized, when he came down to the floor,