In these eight weeks a quiescence that was like a hand to the
reverberating parchment of a drum had come over her. It was, in fact, as
if the whole throbbing orchestration of her universe had stopped as it
sometimes can seem to upon the motion-picture screen, leaving the action
to click on quietly without the excitation of music.
She had taken, at the instance of Mrs. Blair, a room in an Eleventh
Street house. The odor of Bohemia, which is the odor of poverty through
cigarette smoke, lay on the hallways. There were frequent all-night
revelries reverberated down from the skylight room on the top floor, and
one evening a passing group had beat a can-can of invitation on her
doorway; but she could lock and bolt herself into her room, a box, it is
true, at two dollars and a half a week, but it boasted half curtains of
yellow scrim, a couch-bed with a moth-eaten but gay wool cover, and a
small square of table with a reading lamp attached by a tube to the
gas jet.
She found herself during the routine of her business day looking forward
to these long, quiet evenings beside the tiny table. There had been
eight unbroken weeks of them, and each Sunday a fresh little mound of
sheer garments to be carried out to Spuyten Duyvil.
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