My clothes were not burned, but soaking wet, and so I missed my train—the train that Paul was going to meet.
XLIX
OH, how good it was to enter New York once more! I remembered how ugly the city had looked to me that first time when I had come from Boston. Now even the rows of flat houses and dingy tall buildings seemed to take on a sturdy and friendly beauty.
Paul was walking up and down the station, and he came rushing up to me, as I came through the gates. He was pale, and even seemed to tremble, as he caught me by the arm and cried:
“When you did not come on that train, I was afraid you had changed your mind, and were not coming back to me. I’ve been waiting here all day, watching each train that arrived from Providence. Oh, sweetheart, I’ve been nearly crazy!”
I told him about the fire, and he seized hold of my hands, and examined them.
“Don’t tell me you hurt yourself!” he cried. And when I reassured him, it was all I could do to keep him from hugging me right there in the station. All the way on the car he held my hand, and although he did not say anything at all to me, I knew just what was in his heart. He loved me, and nothing else in all the whole wide world mattered.
He had helped me out at the studio building, and now as I went up the old rickety stairs, I realized that this was my home!
It was a ramshackle, very old, neglected, rickety sort of place, and I do not know why they called it Paresis Row. The name did not sound ugly to me, somehow. I loved everything about the place, even the queer business carried on on the lower floors, and old Mary, the slatternly caretaker, who scolded the boys alternately and then did little kindnesses for them. I remember how once she kept a creditor away from poor Fisher, by waving her broom at him, till he fled in fear.
I laughed as we went by the door of that crazy old artist that the boys used to tease by dropping a piece of iron on the floor after holding it up high. They would wait a few minutes, and then he would come hobbling up the stairs. There would be three regular taps, and then he would put his head in and say: