Then something in his absorption threw her into a reverie of her own. A little later she found herself in her room. She was sitting by the window in a far-away mood of exaltation, floating, her intellect freed in some strange fashion from her environment.
If any one had told Jean Caspian that she would end that day in a beatified frame of mind, she would have thought it madness. Had she not given up all hope? But now, suddenly, she found herself asking: “Why am I so happy? Why does everything seem changed?” Strange! In the wretchedest hour of her life a mysterious, inspiring power had risen to support her. It stood beside her now like an invisible husband. What was it? Perhaps it was what people had called the “genius” in her. She was aware only of a swift, potent reaction, which made her body quiver with a new vitality.
“That nickel!” she repeated. Still uncomprehending, she was already sure. Then, wonderfully, the vague radiance within her soul blazed up into an idea, clear, compelling, prophetic. She rose with a serene, confident smile, and pulled down the shade.
“The gutter-nickel!” In her face glowed a secret illumination.
On the next Monday morning, when Clara Coolwood, enthusiastic over a stock company vacancy in Lowell, Massachusetts, rang the doorbell of Mrs. Bunting’s boarding-house, she was answered with the curt statement that Miss Caspian was no longer there. She had gone, and had left no address.
III
“OVER in Dell’s room.” How often every day that little phrase answered, “Where’ve you been?” “Where are you going?” “Where’d you hear that?” “Over in Dell’s room.”
Della Prance’s room was No. 381, third floor, in a little ramshackle hotel on upper Broadway. Della Prance and her elder, divorced, “not-feeling-very-well” sister had grumbled daily at the old peacock-blue and garnet plush furniture, with its nibbled corners and threadbare polka dots; at the dilapidated cretonne-covered divan, with “that caster out again”; and at the dirty, torn, faded old-rose wall-paper, only to have Della conclude, sighing: “Oh, well, what’s the use of tearing up and moving? After all, Sis, the old place has got atmosphere.”
Evidently there were others who shared her opinion. For never was there such a popular rendezvous as “over in Dell’s room.” And never was there a girl so popular as Della Prance.
“Over in Dell’s room” they laughed; “over in Dell’s room” they wept. From the unknown aspirant of Smiley’s to the “featured” celebrity who could not understand why she got those awful notices on her opening night, one and all received genuine sympathy “over in Dell’s room.”