Youth and the Bright Medusa | Page 5

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:
"Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub,--and,
anyhow, he's cleaner than most people."
"Cleaner than me?" her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck
and her fragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of
outraged nymphs. Something flashed through his mind about a man
who was turned into a dog, or was pursued by dogs, because he
unwittingly intruded upon the bath of beauty.
"No, I didn't mean that," he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish
stubble of his muscular jaws. "But I know he's cleaner than I am."

"That I don't doubt!" Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,
and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe
close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar
was frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door
and to his own bed in the corner among the bones.
Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and
coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had
washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar's sponge, it was quite
possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The
playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who
occupied the front apartment,--but he, as he admitted, "was usually
pye-eyed, when he wasn't in Buffalo." He went home to Buffalo
sometimes to rest his nerves.
It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub
after Caesar;--but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned
for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized
the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub that
any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left
cigarette ends on the moulding.
All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get
back at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain.
When he heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped
quickly into the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.
"I don't wish to be exigent, Miss,"--he had certain grand words that he
used upon occasion--"but if this is your trunk, it's rather in the way
here."
"Oh, very well!" she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her
handbag. "I'll have it moved when I can get a man to do it," and she
went down the hall with her free, roving stride.
Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left
on the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.

III
In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room
from Miss Bower's, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on
hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closet
door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing,
and he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter
overcoat. Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy
clothes and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court.
The closet was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one
hot afternoon he set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of
forgotten laundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as
his middle when he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and
overshoes together. When he took his overcoat from its place against
the partition, a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark
enclosure,--a knot hole, evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west
room. He had never noticed it before, and without realizing what he
was doing, he stooped and squinted through it.
Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad,
doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not
happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity
was not improper to any one