r his nails,
right to the quick. Sometimes they bleed and it must hurt him."

"Apparently the gentleman has the manicuring habit in a serious form,"
said Green, seeing that Miss Sadie had paused, in expectation of an
answer from him.

"He sure has--in the most vi'lent form," she agreed. "He's got other
habits too. He's sure badly stuck on the movies."

"I beg your pardon--on the what?"

"On the movies--the moving pictures," she explained. "Well, oncet in a
while I enjoy a good fillum myself, but I'm no bigot on the subject--I
can take my movies or I can let 'em be. But not that man that just now
went out. All the time I'm doing his nails he don't talk about nothing
else hardly, except the moving pictures, he's seen that day or the day
before. It's right ridiculous, him being a grown-up man and everything.
I actually believe he never misses a new fillum at that new moving
picture place three doors above here, or at that other one, that's
opened up down by Two Hundred an' Thirtieth Street. He seems to
patronise just those two. I guess he lives 'round here somewhere. Yet he
don't seem to be very well acquainted in this part of town neither.
Well, it sure takes all kind of people to make a world, don't it?"

Temporarily Miss Sadie lapsed into silence, never noticing that what she
said had caused her chief auditor to bend forward in absorbed interest.
He sat with his eyes on the Greek youth who worked over his shoes, but
his mind was busy with certain most interesting speculations.

When the bootblack had given his restored and resplendent russets a
final loving rub, and had deftly inserted a new lace where the old one
had been, Mr. Green decided that he needed a manicure and he moved
across the shop, and as the manicure lady worked upon his nails he
siphoned the shallow reservoir of her little mind as dry as a bone. The
job required no great amount of pump-work either, for this Miss Sadie
dearly loved the sound of her own voice and was gratefully glad to tell
him all she knew of the stranger who favoured such painful manicuring
processes and who so enjoyed a moving picture show. For his part, Green
had seen only the man's side face, and that casually and at a fleeting
glance; but before the young lady was through with her description, he
knew the other's deportment and contour as though he had passed him a
hundred times and each time had closely studied him.

To begin with, the man was sallow and dark, and his age wa