up through the hole like a strong draught, a big, beautiful voice, and it sounded rather like a professional’s.  A piano had arrived in the morning, Hedger remembered.  This might be a very great nuisance.  It would be pleasant enough to listen to, if you could turn it on and off as you wished; but you couldn’t.  Caesar, with the gas light shining on his collar and his ugly but sensitive face, panted and looked up for information.  Hedger put down a reassuring hand.

“I don’t know.  We can’t tell yet.  It may not be so bad.”

He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended, with quite a new feeling about his neighbour.  Her voice, like her figure, inspired respect,—­if one did not choose to call it admiration.  Her door was shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusive trunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall.

II

For two days Hedger didn’t see her.  He was painting eight hours a day just then, and only went out to hunt for food.  He noticed that she practised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then she locked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace.  He heard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his.  Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath.  In the evening she sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn’t bother him.  When he was working well he did not notice anything much.  The morning paper lay before his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kicked the sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening.  Sometimes he read it and sometimes he did not.  He forgot there was anything of importance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio.  Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in other people; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in the scandal about the Babies’ Hospital.  A grey wolf, living in a Wyoming canyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than was Don Hedger.

One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the hall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with a heavy towel.  Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood a tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from her marble arms.  In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath.

“I wish,” she said distinctly, standing in his way, “I wish you wouldn’t wash your dog in the tub.  I never heard of such a thing!  I’ve found his hair in the tub, and I’ve smelled a doggy smell, and now I’ve caught you at it.  It’s an outrage!”

Hedger was badly frightened.  She was so tall and positive, and was fairly blazing with beauty and anger.  He stood blinking, holding on to his sponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her.  But what he actually said was: