Chapter III

Melissa Wayne went home in the subway. The Marchesa had her being in the Eighties ... just off Riverside ... and the room which had, unfortunately, as its owner described it, no gas-jet, occupied a small and none too airy part of the fifth floor front of a grimy brownstone house on Sixty-third ... near Columbus.

It was, take it by and large, or any way you like, exactly like an enormous number of other houses, whose dingy curtains hang limp forever behind bleared, deep windows; whose steps lead up to dark distasteful doorways; and whose halls reek unceasingly of the less inviting sorts of food. Melissa lived there because her room was cheap and most of her life was spent, after all, in an office; but she ate, when she could, in tea-rooms, so as to obtain a certain amount of variety, and upon such occasions as she couldn’t eat in tea-rooms, she used the thrifty hospitality of her boarding-place with her eyes upon her plate and a forbidding expression about her mouth.

“High-hat stuff,” her fellow-diners considered it and let her be, accordingly with of course an occasional exception.

There was, for example, a pleasant enough young salesman, expert in gentlemen’s toggery, who would gladly in the beginning have favored Melissa with graceful attentions. His place was next hers at the table--when she sat there. But she disposed of him summarily.

“Ah,” said he, upon their initial encounter, his name was Curtis ... not that it matters ... Arthur Curtis, originally of some sweet Auburn in southern Iowa.... “Ah--I see we are to be neighbors--too bad we haven’t been introduced!”

“Is it necessary?” asked Melissa with frosty significance.

The unhappy young man, accustomed to eventual if not earlier capitulation on the part of the selected fair, rather rushed upon his fate.

“I don’t need it if you don’t,” he assured her blithely.

“I fancy no one is going to need it,” returned Melissa, unsmiling, and continued her dinner in silence.

When Mr. Curtis some moments later arrived at her meaning, he was silent as well and flushed darkly above his rice pudding with currants. He thought of withering Melissa with a few trenchant words. He couldn’t however think of the words. So their acquaintance began and ended just there. Melissa’s fault entirely. He was a harmless and not unpleasing person, if one hadn’t a prejudice against perfumed brilliantine and stubby fingers. Melissa, of course had. Which settled the whole thing out of court.

He would have taken her to the movies--and to dance ... perhaps even to an occasional show. He wasn’t in the smartest shop in town but he had ideas--and prospects.

However, after Melissa’s unpardonable rudeness, he passed her on the stairs with a justifiably clipped G’morning--and G’d evening--and that was that!

Other dwellers in the brownstone place passed her frequently with no salutation at all. Perhaps, one reason Melissa stayed there. If she couldn’t have the things she wanted ... as she had said to the Marchesa--she wasn’t in any case going to want the things she could get. That meant deterioration. And Melissa preferred loneliness, isolation, even absolute ostracism, to that.

Upon the evening of her twenty-fifth birthday, therefore, she stopped at a tea-room, a block or so away from her fifth floor front, and did herself sensibly, if not too luxuriously, with soup, a veal cutlet, potatoes and tapioca.

She didn’t enjoy it. What she really wanted was a shrimp cocktail, guinea-hen en casserole, an artichoke, perhaps--perhaps not--in any case some very delicate ice, and black coffee in a tiny, fragile cup ... “with one lump, if you please!” ... to a bowing waiter.

The girl who served Melissa’s soup and tapioca had a spot on her apron and talked through her nose--also too much.

She said--“It’s a grand night if you don’t care what you say ...” and, slopping a glass of water as she set it down, she observed airily--“Butter-fingers!”

She was the friendliest creature imaginable but what is so superfluous as an undesired friend?

Melissa made no answer beyond paying her check and leaving a ten-cent tip, whereupon the butter-fingered one uttered a maidenly oath and went on to the next prospect.

It wasn’t the sort of tip Melissa would have preferred to give, but it was the sort she had learned to. Tips mount up--when one hasn’t Golconda in one’s pocket. A quarter takes on, at times, noticeably nearing the end of each month, the roundness and general aspect of the moon. A dime is smaller--not to say thinner.

Quarters, dimes and nickels! Melissa would have liked never to have to count her change again ... to say merely, of anything less than a dollar--“You may keep it!” to the world of service at large.

However--it wasn’t what she would have liked that set her fashions.

She passed her landlady in the hallway, having come at last to the roof she called home and the landlady, a gray-haired, rather tired-faced person forever hurrying after something and not finding it, stopped for a gentle reminder.

“I left your bill in your box, Miss Wayne.”

Melissa took out her purse and paid.

“I have it just here, Mrs. Robinson.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Robinson--“if everybody was as prompt as you!”

But it left Melissa’s purse distinctly flat--not that it had been rotund, before.

In her own room, with the door shut, she stood before the bureau, taking off her hat and calculated unwillingly.... “That’s the rent paid up for next week. If I go to the Symphony, Thursday night ... and to see Simone ... I can’t have new gloves--and I should. Wednesday night is cheaper ... but Thursday they’re playing Ravel--and Tschaikowsky--Thursday it is! White hyacinths, again!”

She put her hat away in the closet which was narrow and dark and for all her best efforts smelt of mice. She took off her shoes and put them on trees; put on a pair of soft slippers and getting out of her frock put that away in the closet too; carefully, upon a hanger, between a warm but uninteresting gray coat and a serviceable but quite uninspired black taffeta.

Then she sat down in the rocking-chair at the foot of the bed and put her hands over her face and cried. Very softly--and very unwisely--since crying gets one nowhere. Cried because the room she sat in and the life she was living were neither the room nor the life of her dreams. Yet the dreams persisted--cruelly.

“Oh, Lord!” she said to herself at last, with a long shaky sigh--“what’s the use!”

She washed out a pair of black silk stockings and hung them across a chair-back. She loathed washing out stockings, but she did it every night. Otherwise they couldn’t have been silk. She looked after her nails and her hair and her face. She was in her nightgown at last, a sensible affair of Philippine embroidery on white muslin, with a corduroy dressing-gown over it.

She looked, even in that unimaginative attire, rather well. Her dark soft hair hung in waves about her shoulders--real waves--she couldn’t have afforded so perfect a marcel ... and her eyes, in the mirror, were wistful and shadowy.

“You poor little fool!” she said to her frowning image--by way of good night--“Spilling your soul to the Marchesa--just because she asked you. Won’t you ever learn--to keep yourself--inside yourself? Won’t you ever learn--that nobody cares? She’s probably chuckling over you, now--the poor working-girl--with a siren-complex!... Oh, Lissa--if only you didn’t know what you wanted! Or could be happy without it....”

She opened the window and stood there, looking out across the street. It was as she had said--nothing but dingy brown houses, as like the one she lived in as one ant-hill is like another.

The sky above the houses hung misty and far--no stars showing. A mere sliver of sky with a cold wind in abeyance.

“Somewhere,” thought Melissa, clenching her fingers in the curtain, lifting her rebellious eyes to that inverted abyss--“there’s a window I could stand in and look--clean across heaven. I’ll never see it, of course! I’ll never love anything but Beauty--my whole life long ... and that I’ll never have.... Oh, God,--wherever you are--what pleasure do you get out of such a world?”

She added, because with even a sliver of sky He might after all overhear.... “It’s all right--I suppose You know what it’s about--_I_ don’t!”

Then she went to bed and after a long, dragging hour, to sleep ... the drab-walled room cradled her as a tree cradles a dryad.