“Yes, I’m Romeo all right—­the lad’s there, never fear, gutter-snipe.  But—­the bottle is not full.”

After that she never attempted to change his ruling.  She was letter perfect in the bitter lesson, and if the sale of papers did not bring in enough to fill the bottle, she accepted the hard fact with the calm of great determination and did not go near the lodger’s room, but went to bed instead.

Perhaps it was these rare occasions of rest that kept her alive.

After the lodger had been teaching her for several years her mother died and was buried in the potters’ field.  Cake managed to keep two rooms of the wretched flat, and no word of his landlady’s demise reached the lodger’s drink-dulled ears.  Otherwise Cake feared he might depart, taking with him her one big chance to reach the light.  You see, she did not know the lodger.  Things might have been different if she had.  But he was never a human being to her, even after she knew the truth; only a symbol, a means to the great end.

Her brothers went away—­to the penitentiary and other places.  One by one the flood of life caught her sisters and swept them out, she did not know to what.  She never even wondered.  She had not been taught to care.  She had never been taught anything.  The knowledge that she must be famous danced through her dreams like a will-o’-the-wisp; had grown within her in the shape of a great pain that never ceased; only eased a little as she strove mightily toward the goal.

So she still sold papers, a homely, gawky, long-legged girl in ragged clothes much too small for her, and slaved at Maverick’s for the lodger’s nightly dole that he might teach her and she be famous.

At first he was keen on the meat and drink—­more especially the drink.  Later, gradually, a change came over him.  Only Cake did not notice this change.  She was too set on being taught so she could become famous.  At first the lodger was all oaths and blows with shouts of fierce, derisive laughter intermingled.

“My God!” he would cry.  “If Noyes could only see this—­if he only could!”

This Noyes, it appeared, was a man he furiously despised.  When he was in the third stage of drunkenness he would never teach Cake, but would only abuse his enemies, and this Noyes invariably came in for a fearful shower of epithets.  It was he as Cake heard it, sitting huddled on the old dry-goods box, the candle casting strange shadows into her gaunt, unchildlike face, who was the cause of the lodger’s downfall.  But for Noyes—­with a blasting array of curses before the name—­he would now have what Cake so ardently strove for:  Fame.  But for Noyes he would be acting in his own theatre, riding in his own limousine, wearing his own diamonds, entertaining his own friends upon his own gold plate.

When he was still too sober to take a really vital interest in the teaching, he was a misanthrope, bitter and brutal, with an astonishing command of the most terrible words.  At these times he made the gravest charges against Noyes; charges for which the man should be made accountable, even to such a one as the lodger.  One evening Cake sat watching him, waiting for this mood to pass so that the teaching might begin.