The interior of the room of Miss Spaulding and Miss Reed remains in view, while the scene discloses, on the other side of the partition wall in the same house, the bachelor apartment of Mr. Samuel Grinnidge. Mr. Grinnidge in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his pipe in his mouth, has the effect of having just come in; his friend Mr. Oliver Ransom stands at the window, staring out into the November weather.
Grinnidge: “How long have you been waiting here?”
Ransom: “Ten minutes—ten years. How should I know?”
Grinnidge: “Well, I don’t know who else should. Get back to-day?”
Ransom: “Last night.”
Grinnidge: “Well, take off your coat, and pull up to the register, and warm your poor feet.” He puts his hand out over the register. “Confound it! somebody’s got the register open in the next room! You see, one pipe comes up from the furnace and branches into a V just under the floor, and professes to heat both rooms. But it don’t. There was a fellow in there last winter who used to get all my heat. Used to go out and leave his register open, and I’d come in here just before dinner and find this place as cold as a barn. We had a running fight of it all winter. The man who got his register open first in the morning got all the heat for the day, for it never turned the other way when it started in one direction. Used to almost suffocate—warm, muggy days—maintaining my rights. Some piano-pounder in there this winter, it seems. Hear? And she hasn’t lost any time in learning the trick of the register. What kept you so late in the country?”
Ransom, after an absent-minded pause: “Grinnidge, I wish you would give me some advice.”
Grinnidge: “You can have all you want of it at the market price.”
Ransom: “I don’t mean your legal advice.”
Grinnidge: “I’m sorry. What have you been doing?”