"Come on in, Tim," she said, looking strangely at Mary Louise.
An overpowering anger came swelling in the latter's veins. She walked back to the door and stood before the placid bovine figure of her room-mate. For a moment she could not trust herself to speak, she was trembling so.
"I said for him to wait outside—there," she repeated with quavering emphasis.
Maida's face looked flat and large and sober. There was a great, vast, pasty blank of cheek from her sombre eyes to the downcast corner of her mouth. "I heard you," she replied. "Come in, Tim."
Mary Louise felt impotent. She watched the face before her, stolid, immutable, expressionless. She felt suffocated for breath. She plucked at her skirts with her fingers. Finally she gasped out:
"Not—not into my room. If he does, I'm through with it—and you. You understand?"
Maida shrugged her shoulders, and a slight smile curled the corners of her lips. She turned away.
"That's your lookout, not mine. You're making an awful fool of yourself, McCallum."
And then she closed the door.
Mary Louise walked blindly down the hall. She stumbled into the elevator and did not answer when the elevator boy spoke to her. When she gained the street the rush of the night air against her face steadied her a bit. She turned off promptly north and struck out for the down-town district.