"Ye can go up, top floor back, feel to the right as far as ye can go, and knock."
Seized with the general decadence he toiled upward with slow, lifeless steps. An odor of stale tobacco hung in the air. At the first floor a door left purposely open showed a man in shirt sleeves, shaving, while a woman in a wrapper arrived in time to study his passing. Through the darkness into which he now ascended came an atmosphere of musk and the scraping of a violin. Groping down the blind passage with outstretched fingers, his hands finally struck against the wall. He felt to the right, found a door, and knocked. A voice replied, uncertainly:
"Yes—come in."
He stepped out of the blackness, blinking a moment at the sudden light. The woman he saw was indeed Sheila Vaughn.
"Miss Morissey?" he asked, shutting the door carefully.
"Yes."
He bowed and, indifferent to her questioning, remained sweeping the room with precise scrutiny. In the walls the same decrepitude was manifest, in the furniture the same infirmity. A patch of brown paper replaced a pane in the window, the globe on the gas-jet was bitten and smoked. On the rakish bed was laid out the green silk dress, a clothes brush on top. In its place she wore a soiled muslin, raveled at the cuffs and the neck, while the neat boots had given way to frayed red slippers. A wrapper, a musty dress or two, in impoverished contrast to the elegance on the bed, hung from a row of pegs.
The eye of the lawyer, after noting each evidence of unusual poverty, rested on the table where a few photographs were displayed. He advanced and picking up each in turn said pleasantly:
"Ah, Miss Morissey, you have had a career?"