For two days Hedger didn't see her. He was painting eight hours a day
just then, and only went out to hunt for food. He noticed that she
practised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then she
locked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace. He
heard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his.
Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath. In the evening
she sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn't bother him. When he was
working well he did not notice anything much. The morning paper lay
before his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kicked
the sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening. Sometimes
he read it and sometimes he did not. He forgot there was anything of
importance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio.
Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in other
people; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in the
scandal about the Babies' Hospital. A grey wolf, living in a Wyoming
canyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than was
Don Hedger.
One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the
hall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with a
heavy towel. Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood a
tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from her
marble arms. In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath.
"I wish," she said distinctly, standing in his way, "I wish you wouldn't
wash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I've found his
hair in the tub, and I've smelled a doggy smell, and now I've caught you
at it. It's an outrage!"
Hedger was badly frightened. She was so tall and positive, and was fairly
blazing with beauty and anger. He stood blinking, holding on to his
sponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her. But
what he actually said was:
"Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub,--and, anyhow,
he's cleaner than most people."
"Cleaner than me?" her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck and her
fragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of outraged nymphs.
Something flashed through his mind about a man who was turned into a dog,
or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath of
beauty.
"No, I didn't mean that," he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish
stubble of his muscular jaws. "But I know he's cleaner than I am."
"That I don't doubt!" Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,
and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe
close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar was
frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door and
to his own bed in the corner among the bones.
Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and
coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had
washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar's sponge, it was quite
possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The
playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who
occupied the front apartment,--but he, as he admitted, "was usually
pye-eyed, when he wasn't in Buffalo." He went home to Buffalo sometimes
to rest his nerves.
It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub
after Caesar;--but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned
for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized
the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub
that any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left
cigarette ends on the moulding.
All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get back
at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When he
heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly into
the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.
"I don't wish to be exigent, Miss,"--he had certain grand words that he
used upon occasion--"but if this is your trunk, it's rather in the way
here."
"Oh, very well!" she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her
handbag. "I'll have it moved when I can get a man to do it," and she went
down the hall with her free, roving stride.
Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left on
the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.