This boarder was a man with a past.  And he had left it pretty far behind, else he had never rented a room and meals from the mother of Cake.  In this boarder drink and debauchery had completely beaten out of shape what had once been a very noble figure of a man.  His body was shrunken and trembling; the old, ragged clothes he wore flapped about him like the vestments of a scarecrow.  His cheeks had the bruised congested look of the habitual drinker, his nose seemed a toadstool on his face, and his red eyes were almost vanished behind puffy, purple, pillow-like lids.  His voice was husky and whispering, except when he raised it.  Then it was surprisingly resonant and mellow, with something haunting in it like the echo of an echo of a very moving sweetness.

One night Cake, returning all weary and played-out from dish-washing at Maverick’s, heard him speaking in this loud voice of his, pushed the door open a crack, and peeked in.  He was standing in the middle of the floor evidently speaking what the child called to herself “a piece.”  Her big mouth crooked derisively in the beginning of what is now her famous smile.  The lodger went on speaking, being fairly well stimulated at the time, and presently Cake pushed the door wider and crept in to the dry-goods box, where her mother always kept a candle, and sat down.

The lodger talked on and on while Cake sat rapt, the flickering candle in her hands throwing strange lights and shadows upon her gaunt face.  How was she to know she was the last audience of one of the greatest Shakespearian actors the world had ever seen?

It was a grave and wondering Cake that crept to her place to sleep that night between her two older sisters.  And while they ramped against her and chewed and snorted in her ears, she listened all over again to that wonderful voice and was awed by the colour and beauty of the words that it had spoken.  She slept, and saw before her the globe of light, trembling and luminous, the one bright thing of beauty her life had ever known, that seemed to draw her up from darkness slowly and with great suffering.  Trembling and weeping she awoke in the dawn, and the strange pain that had tortured her so much and that she had called hunger and sought to assuage with scraps from the plates that came to the sink at Maverick’s became articulate at last.  With her hands clasped hard against her breast she found relief in words.

“I gotta be somebody,” sobbed the child.  “I mus’ be famous, I mus’!”

She arose to find life no longer a confused struggle for food, but a battle and a march; a battle to get through one day to march on to the next, and so on and on until, in that long line of days that stretched out ahead of her like chambers waiting to be visited, she reached the one where rested Fame, that trembling, luminous globe of beauty it was so vitally necessary for her to achieve.  “How come he c’n talk like that?” she demanded of herself, musing on the lodger’s wonderful exhibition over the greasy dish-water at Maverick’s.