The girl turned back to her typemachine. “He’s a jealous old devil when I leave the room,” she said. “I think the person who rented him before I did addressed envelopes all day—kept cranking him back and forth against time. Now I ride a little ways—then let him stop and browse. We ramble——”
Pidge stopped. Her eyes looked dry and smarting, as if tears were on the verge.
“Oh, Miss Claes,” she went on, “I’m just as crazy as that—I mean my figures of speech! Cranking him back and forth, and in the same breath letting him stop and browse. I wish you wouldn’t bring me this stuff any more. The coffee’s so good that it hurts—and the eggs. I always cry when I’m hurt.”
“But, Pidge, think what a privilege it is for me to climb from the heart of New York to eighteenth-century France, and not leave the house——”
“But you find a twisted cubist sort of France—part Dumas, part Mexican Plaza, Los Angeles, and the rest me!”
“At least, you’re not carried away with the idea that it’s perfect.”
Pidge regarded the other’s face closely. She could see with uncanny clearness in this little dark room where she had struggled night and day for nearly three months; but what she saw now, or was looking for, she hardly knew herself. Her own face was spooky from sleepless strain.
“I’m eating shamelessly,” she said.
A moment later, she pointed to the rear wall, and whispered the question:
“Has Nagar stopped writing? I haven’t raced typewriters with him lately.”