Her business was done, but she did not rise. Her swift eyes ran over the furnishings of the room—the bed, the crippled wash-stand, with its chipped bowl and broken-lipped pitcher, the dishes in the soap-box cupboard, the gas stove under the bed, the bare, splintered floor, the walls from which the blue kalsomine was flaking—ran over David's shapeless clothes. Then they stopped on his face.
"You're a queer bird," she said abruptly.
He started. "Queer?"
She gave a little jerk of a nod. "You didn't always live in a room like this, nor wear them kind of clothes. And you didn't learn your manners over on the Bowery neither. What's the matter? Up against it?"
David stared at her. "Don't you think there may be another queer bird in the room?" he suggested.
She was not rebuffed, but for a second she studied his face with an even sharper glance, in which there was the least glint of suspicion. "You mean me," she said. "I live across the hall with my father. When I'm at work I'm a maid in swell families—sometimes a nurse girl. Nothing queer about that."
"No—o," he said hesitatingly.
She returned to the attack. "What do you do?"
"I'm looking for work."
"What have you worked at?"