And that night she asked him, prefacing her question with the offering of an almost perfect lamb-chop.  Only one piece had been cut from it since the purchaser, at that moment apprised by Maverick himself that the arrival of the police was imminent, had taken a hasty departure.

“Who learned you to talk that-a-way?” demanded Cake, licking a faint, far-away flavour of the chop from her long, thin fingers.

The lodger, for a moment, had changed places with the candle.  That is to say, he sat upon the dry-goods box, the candle burned upon the floor.  And, having been most unfortunate that day, the lodger was tragically sober.  He bit into the chop voraciously, like a dog, with his broken, discoloured teeth.

“A book ‘learned’ me,” he said, “and practice and experience—­and something else.”  He broke off short.  “They called it genius then,” he said bitterly.

Cake took a short step forward.  That thing beneath her prominent breastbone pained her violently, forced her on to speak.

“You learn me,” she said.

The lodger ceased to chew and stared, the chop bone uplifted in his dirty hand.  A pupil for him!

“You want to do this perhaps,” he began.  “Pray do not mock me; I am a very foolish, fond old man——­”

The disreputable, swollen-faced lodger with a nose like a poisoned toadstool vanished.  Cake saw an old white-haired man, crazy and pitiful, yet bearing himself grandly.  She gasped, the tears flew to her eyes, blinding her.  The lodger laughed disagreeably, he was gnawing on the chop bone again.

“I suppose you think because you’ve found me here it is likely I’ll teach you—­you!  You starved alley cat!” he snarled.

Cake did not even blink.  It is repetition that dulls, and she was utterly familiar with abuse.

“And suppose I did—­’learn’ you,” he sneered, “what would you do with it?”

“I would be famous,” cried Cake.

Then the lodger did laugh, looking at her with his head hanging down, his swollen face all creased and purple, his hair sticking up rough and unkempt.  He laughed, sitting there a degraded, debauched ruin, looking down from the height of his memories upon the gaunt, unlovely child of the slums who was rendered even more unlovely by the very courage that kept her waiting beside the broken door.

“So you think I could learn you to be famous, hey?” Even the words of this gutter filth he sought to construe into something nattering to himself.

Cake nodded.  Really she had not thought of it that way at all.  There was no thinking connected with her decision.  The dumb hours she had spent staring up the air-shaft had resolved themselves with the passing years into a strange, numb will to do.  There was the light and she must reach it.  Indeed the Thing there behind the narrow walls of her chest gave her no alternative.  She did not think she wanted to be an actress.  It was a long time after that before she knew even what an actress was.  She did not know what the lodger had been.  No.  Instinctively, groping and inarticulate, she recognized in him the rags and shreds of greatness, knew him to be a one-time dweller in that temple whither, willing or not, she was bound, to reach it or to die.