He lifted his eyes.... He gazed steadily to the left....
IV
Before night Susannah had found a room which exactly suited her purpose. This was as much a matter of design as of luck. She had heard of the place before. It was a large building in the West Twenties which had formerly been the imposing parsonage of an imposing and very important church. The church had long ago gone the way of all old Manhattan buildings. But the parsonage, divided into an infinite number of cubby-hole rooms, had become a lodging-house. A lodging-house with a difference, however. For whereas in the ordinary establishment of this kind, one paid rent to a landlady who lived on the spot, here one paid it to an agent who came from somewhere, promptly every Monday morning, for the purpose of collection. It was a perfect hiding-place. You did not know your neighbor. Your neighbor did not know you. With due care, one could plan his life so that he met nobody.
Susannah, except for a choice of rooms, did not for an interval plan her life at all. She made that choice instantly, however. Of two rooms situated exactly opposite each other at the back of the second floor, she chose one because it overlooked a yard containing a tree. It was a tiny room, whitewashed; meagerly and nondescriptly furnished. But the door-frame and window-frame offered decoration. Following the ecclesiastical design of the whole house, they peaked into triangles of carved wood.
Susannah gave scant observation to any of these things. Once alone in her room, she locked the door. Then she removed two things from her suitcase—a nightgown and the miniature of Glorious Lutie. The latter she suspended by a thumbtack beside the mirror of her bureau. Then she undressed and went to bed. She slept fitfully all the rest of that day and all that night. Early in the morning she crept out, bought herself, at a Seventh Avenue delicatessen shop, a jar of milk and a loaf of bread. She lunched and dined in her room. She breakfasted next morning on the remains.
Her sleep was deep and dreamless; but in her waking moments her thoughts pursued the same treadmill.
“Glorious Lutie,” she began one of the wordless monologues which she was always addressing to the miniature, “I ought to have known long ago that they were a gang of crooks! Why don’t we trust our intuitions? I suppose it’s because our intuitions are not always right. I can’t quite go with anything so magic, so irrational as intuition! And then again I’m afraid I’m too logical. But I’m always having the same thing happen to me. Perhaps I’m talking with somebody I have met for the first time. Suddenly that person makes a statement. Instantly—it’s like a little hammer knocking on my mind—something inside me says: ‘That is a lie. He is lying deliberately and he knows he lies.’ Now you would think that I would trust that lead, that I would follow it implicitly. But do I? No! Never! I pay no more attention to it than as though it never happened. And generally my intuition is right. But always I find it out too late. Now that little hammer has been knocking its warnings about the Warner-Byan-O’Hearn bunch ever since I started to work for them. But I could not make myself pay any attention to it. I did not want to believe it, for one thing. And then of course the work was awfully interesting. I kept calling myself all kinds of names for thinking— And they were kind. I wouldn’t believe it. But my intuition kept telling me that Warner was a hypocrite. And as for Byan—”