"I don"t know."
She looked at him steadily again.
"What do you want?" was his inquiry.
"Where do you live?"
"I have no bed. I am in a lawyer"s office. I can"t afford a boarding-house just now, and I sleep on the office floor."
"How do you like that?" she asked.
"I don"t like it."
"Then why do you stay there?"
"Where else would I sleep? I have only so much a week."
"Would you like to stay here to-night?"
"Maybe. This is better than the office floor; at least I imagine it is."
The curtains parted and there was a heavy step upon the floor. A man came in. He stopped and looked at the couple grimly. He was a big man whose cheeks had jowls and whose eyes were red. He had the air of a bully. He seemed perfectly at ease and conscious of his status, and the woman started, then looked up half anxiously and half defiantly.
The man spoke first:
"What are you doing here?"
"I am talking with this gentleman at the table."
"You mustn"t talk with these fellows. Get out of here!" he said, turning to Harlson.
Harlson was not really in a pleasant frame of mind; he had been too hungry. It was not the occasion on which a flabby bully should have thus addressed him. He did not answer the man, but turned to the woman.
"Is that your husband?" he asked.
"No."
"What is he, then?"
It was the intruder who answered, violently:
"She belongs to me, and you"d better get out of here."
"I don"t belong to him! He has lived here, but I want to get away from him! Now," turning recklessly to the man, "you may do what you please!"
The man paid little note to what the woman said. His attention was bestowed upon Harlson.
"Look here, young fellow! Get out of this, and get out quick! You"re in the way!"
Now, upon this young man Harlson, during this conversation, had come a certain increased ill humor. He was in no violent mood, as yet, but he was not, as has been said, one for a big flabby brute to thus annoy.
He was quiet enough, though.
"I"ve come into a restaurant to get my supper."
The man"s red face became redder still. "If you don"t get out, I"ll throw you out!"
Harlson stood up. "I"ll not go!" he said, and then the man rushed upon him.
It was only a clean, quick blow, but there was no check nor parry to mar its full effectiveness. The man plunged forward too confidently, the blow caught him fairly in the face, on the fullness of the cheek, just under the eye, and those bronzed knuckles cut in to the bone. It was a wicked blow, and its force was great enough to hurl the whole body back. The man whirled away under it, and he went toppling down, with his arms thrown up wildly. As he fell, he pitched still further back, in his effort to save himself, and his head struck the wainscoting as he reached the floor. Blood gushed from his cut cheek.
It was a moment or two before he clambered slowly to his feet.
"Shall I hit you just once more?" was Harlson"s query.
The man did not answer. The woman stood looking on curiously, but saying nothing. Harlson waited for a time, then told his a.s.sailant to go away; and the man picked up his hat and stumbled out upon the street.
The woman sat down again. It was some time before she spoke.
"You are strong, and will fight," she said.
"I had nothing else to do."
"Do you want to stay here?"
"It is better than the office floor."
"Will you stay here?"
He hesitated. It was a turning-point in his life, and he knew it.
There was something rather startling to him in it.
Then came the swift reflection: He wanted to know all of life. This was the under-life, the under-current, of which reformers prate so much and know so little. Why not be greater than they? Why not have been a part of it, and in time to come speak knowingly? He was but a part of this world, as accident had made it. He hoped if the world wagged well to be a protector for certain weak ones. It was a world wherein immediate brute force told. Well, he could supply that easily enough.
And what would he not learn? He would learn the city, the ignorance of which had resulted in his being hungry--he, a young man college-bred, and with some knowledge of Quintilian"s crabbedness, or the equations of X and Y in this or that or the Witch of Agnesi. And were not these people part of the world, and was not this life something of which he ought to know the very heart?
Still, there were relations of things to be considered. There were people at home, and it would not do.
Then, just as he turned to refuge the woman who sat looking at him, the curtains parted again and a face appeared. It was the face of a woman, not of the world about him. It was some accident, some sinister, unexampled happening, which had brought the face to the surroundings.
It gave to the wavering man a new idea of this world of shame and sin, and it may have been the deciding ounce.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE REALLY UGLY DUCKLING.
He turned, to the woman across the table: "All right; I will stay."
I am but telling the story of a man of whose life from this time for two years I know but little. He was always reticent about these years, yet always said he had no occasion to regret them. With the life"s outlines, though, with what it really was, aside from details, I became, in a degree, familiar.