"My aunt has a third-story room that is empty. It's a very nice room, though it isn't furnished now. There are only two other roomers, who are very quiet and never bother any one. We never fry onions and there is a pretty good boarding-house only a block away. You could get your meals there."
"It sounds like the very thing. I could furnish the room myself with some of my stuff that's in storage. And— Do you happen to live there?"
"I happen to. Of course, if that's an objection—" She laughed.
"Would you let me set my door on a crack when you sing?"
She nodded. "Since you'd probably do it anyhow!"
"Then I think I could waive that objection. Would you mind speaking to your aunt about it?"
"This very night," she said.
That is how David went to live under the same roof that sheltered
Esther Summers.
It seemed a harmless arrangement. He saw her very rarely there. In the morning he left the house before she did, at the end of the day stayed longer at the office; not by intention but because his work called for longer hours. In the evening she stayed with her faded old aunt in their part of the house. The other roomers were as quiet and exclusive as the prospectus had promised. So David, in his new quarters—pleasant enough once his things had been installed—was left alone with his books, his letters to Shirley and his work for the successful Dick Holden.
But there was something in that house—not to be accounted for by mere creature comforts—that made it easier to fight off the blue devils of loneliness and took away a little of the reminder's stings when some tantalizing shape appeared in his tobacco clouds. Every morning he was awakened by her voice at the piano, a few minutes of scales and then one song, always a true matin song, full of hope and the sheer joy of living. In the evening she sang again, a little longer at scales and another song, sometimes two. Then David's door would be set on a crack and he would lean back in his chair, listening and thrilling with some emotion as vague but as beautiful as a very good idea in ecclesiastical architecture. Sometimes a film would come over his eyes; it is not clear why, for when she sang he forgot to remember that he was a failure, that he was in mourning for a love lately dead and that he had become a mere drudge for money.