He had meant to live lean down in Harrow Street, but his idea of that wasn’t native to the locality. His ramifications for keeping clean were considerable and very disturbing to Pidge Musser, who had been brought up in Southern California to wear a few white garments which she could wash herself. Washing was impossible in her room, and wasn’t at all easy in the hall below where Miss Claes had told her to get her water.
Dicky Cobden was the first gentleman Pidge had ever known. She had met several boys with a streak of genius showing; boys who had come to her father to learn how to write and had taken away something, if not that. Practically all those boys had been “on a shoe string,” and trained to get along without many things that Cobden would have considered actual necessities, including an established routine of order and cleanliness in one’s person and quarters. Pidge had also met many of the “queer” ones of Hollywood and vicinity—men and women who ate this way and that, bathed this way and that, in running waters and still, in sea waters and rain waters, in mud and sunlight, using unctions and ointments, but they were bathing their souls.
Dicky Cobden bathed frequently, carefully, believing beyond cavil that New York and the processes of life grimed him on the outside, that life itself was a constant war against grime, requiring an ever accessible tub, much soap, hot water, changes of clothing, laundry bags, rugs, brushes. Not that Dicky gave any thought to this. It was as if he supposed everybody did the same. Since everybody didn’t and couldn’t; and since everybody didn’t have as much money to spend for bread and meat and tea, as Mr. Cobden did for laundry alone—Pidge was miserably rebellious.
Always as she sat in the presence of Dicky’s altogether thoughtless freshness; sat in her apple-butter colored wool dress which had contained the emotional hurl and thresh of the romantic Lance—always Miss Musser had a hard time to forget herself and was frequently on the verge of becoming defiant and bad-tempered for reasons he didn’t dream.
She suffered, because every evening almost, Dicky invited her out to dine, and not once in four times could she pass the frowning negatives of her own soul. He chose to regard her as superbly honest and unaffected. She really needed those dinners, too. All the future novels and heart throbs needed them. Occasionally she met him after dinner for a walk or a picture, and once she had been lured to an uptown theater. Just once—never again in the brown wool dress!
She felt, as she entered the theater lights that night, that she had been betrayed. She felt also like something Mr. Cobden had found in the street, or that she was helping him make good on a first of April bet. Pidge hadn’t been to more than three “talking shows” in all her nineteen years; to her a show house was a place of darkness, except the screen.
Alone in her room afterward that night, she made a great vow: that when the torrent of American dollars turned loose on her (as it was bound to some time) she would buy outright chests full of lingerie, cabinets of hats, shelves of shoes, and a book of orders for frocks to be delivered at future dates. She would keep clean then if a Santa Ana sandstorm settled on New York and lasted a year.
One raw and cold week-night, Pidge was about done up when she reached Harrow Street. She tried to slip softly past his hall door, but Dicky was there.
“Hard day?” he called.
“Yes,” she said, pushing on. “Everybody’s tired and cross the whole length of New York, like a sore spine.”