BOARDERS WANTED
It was too early in the season for lowered shades or closed shutters. The spring sunshine had taken possession of the big, many-windowed room, repaying the hospitality as other uninvited guests have been known to do, by its indiscreet revelations. In rooms much lived in, a rather endearing shabbiness is a familiar characteristic, suggestive, like a thumbed book, of homely comfort. The room in question had passed this stage and reached the shabbiness eloquent of poverty.
The paper on the walls was faded, and stained from a leak in the roof. The original carpet had been transformed into a rug that shrank annually and now showed threadbare areas, prophetic of gaping holes in the near future. The furniture, too, though of expensive make, had arrived at a point where a series of surgical operations seemed imperative. Yet with it all, a certain plucky defiance was evident in the shabby room. Pictures or calendars hung over the discolored spots on the wall, furniture arranged to conceal the weak spots of the carpet, a crocheted shawl thrown carelessly over the exposed entrails of a veteran armchair, a general air of putting the best foot foremost inevitably suggested that the dilapidated building sheltered youth, ardent and unconquered.
In the smallest chair the room contained, a rocking chair that creaked protestingly under its light burden, sat Miss Zaida Finch, darning a pink silk stocking. Miss Finch's print dress modestly concealed her diminutive lower limbs, her extremely small shoes scarcely peeping from beneath its hem. For all that the eye discerned, her anatomical structure might have been modeled after that of Mrs. Shem in a Noah's ark. Yet with no evidence to substantiate his certainty, any observer would have vowed that Miss Finch's painstaking toil was wholly disinterested. It was impossible to believe that the much-mended pink silk hosiery formed part of her wardrobe.
The industry of Miss Finch was spasmodic. One moment she plied her needle with an intentness indicating that her task absorbed her. And again she let the stocking drop into her lap, and lost herself listening to sounds overhead, footsteps, doors opening and closing, the murmur of voices. Once, rising, she tiptoed to the window and gazed for a long breathless moment at the touring car before the gate, the chauffeur puffing a cigarette with an arrogance characteristic of the driver of a seven-passenger Packard, who knows that at any moment a Ford roadster may round the curve ahead.
Despite occasional lapses Miss Finch was darning industriously when the voices overhead sharpened noticeably. A light staccato of high heels tapping the uncarpeted staircase was followed by the slamming of a door violently enough to shake the building. Miss Finch, groping vainly for the interpretation of these sounds, found her gaze drawn to the window as the Packard swept along the highway, its horn bleating an impassioned farewell.
The door at the rear of Miss Finch's chair opened emphatically, with such emphasis indeed, that the door-knobs parted company, one falling into the hall, the other projecting itself in the direction of Miss Finch as if with hostile intent. And close upon this demonstration a girl entered the room and flung herself into one of the ragged armchairs.
The owner of the pink silk stocking was revealed. It was all in keeping with her audacious color scheme. Her hair was obviously red, and instead of modestly disguising the fact, it used every known artifice to attract attention to itself, curling and crinkling and brazenly thrusting out tendril-like locks to catch the beholder's gaze. Her eyes should have been blue, according to all precedent, but instead they matched her hair, a daring reddish-brown, with yellow flecks like floating gold-leaf. Ordinarily her skin was creamy till the multiplying freckles of summer temporarily disguised its fairness, but at this moment some intense emotion dyed her crimson from her throat to the roots of her hair. Over a blue house dress she wore a sweater of vivid green, assumed, if the truth be told, not for the sake of warmth but to conceal her patched elbows. Her entrance into the room accentuated its faded dinginess and bleached Miss Finch to the color of ashes. Even the spring sunshine paled before her rainbow effect.
"Well, Fritz!" The girl used the incongruous nickname with the carelessness of long custom. "It's all over."