“Yes, the mystical, the occult, the mathematical, and the artistic. Did he talk in bare feet?”
“Yes, and an Eastern robe.”
“That was a camel driver’s robe,” said the girl. “Oh, I didn’t think I’d hear of him here.”
“You won’t. May I call you Pidge?”
“Yes, what you like. My father names everything.”
“It sounds better than Pandora—at least, to me.... I must go down now. A little breakfast party is waiting there. Take off your things. I’ll come back soon. I am Miss Claes and I want to come back already.”
Pidge Musser sat almost in the center of her room, but not quite. At least, she sat in the center of the stiff little cot. She could touch two of the walls. The third was across the narrow aisle from the cot. The fourth was the windowed one, which looked as if it were about to be bricked up entirely. That was quite a distance.
Her room. She was alone. She looked at the door, arose, brought in the key and turned it from the inside. Alone, and this was New York. She could live a month anyway, and write and write on The Lance of the Rivernais. She could be herself and not be told how to live and love and write and bathe and breathe, and change her polarity and promote her spirit and govern her temper and appetites, by a man who was governed by anything but himself.
New York. She had hardly dared to look at it on the way from the train to Washington Square, where the street car had put her down. She had come to Washington Square because one of the boys who studied with her father had said it was the best place to live in all the big town—the cheapest and friendliest and quietest.... It appeared all true, but Miss Claes wasn’t like a rooming-house landlady; quite different, in fact, and astonishing.
“I could hear her talk about New York, forever,” Pidge said half aloud, and this was a remark of considerable force from one who had known the maiming of many words.