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Part 2
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance.
He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once.
He counted out the money.
The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water.
As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
"A young girl--Miss Vashner--Miss Eloise Vashner--do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow."
"No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don't call that one to mind."
No.abcdefgABCDEFG1234FEDCBAAlways no.
Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative.
So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for.
He who had loved her best had tried to find her.
He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep.
The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the raggcd brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a footwide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting.
Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house--The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain.
The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet.
Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port--a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
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