Even the words of
this gutter filth he sought to construe into something nattering to
himself.

Cake nodded. Really she had not thought of it that way at all. There
was no thinking connected with her decision. The dumb hours she had
spent staring up the air-shaft had resolved themselves with the
passing years into a strange, numb will to do. There was the light and
she must reach it. Indeed the Thing there behind the narrow walls of
her chest gave her no alternative. She did not think she wanted to be
an actress. It was a long time after that before she knew even what an
actress was. She did not know what the lodger had been. No.
Instinctively, groping and inarticulate, she recognized in him the
rags and shreds of greatness, knew him to be a one-time dweller in
that temple whither, willing or not, she was bound, to reach it or to
die.

The lodger looked down at the naked chop bone in his hand. The juicy,
broiled meat was comforting to his outraged stomach. Meat. The word
stood out in his mind to be instantly followed by that other word
that, for him, had spelled ruin, made him a ragged panhandler, reduced
him to living among the poorest and most hopeless. Drink! He raised
his head and eyed Cake with crafty calculation.

"What will you pay me for such teaching?" he demanded, and looked down
again at the bone.

What he did in the end, Cake herself was satisfied came to him
afterward. At first he was actuated only by the desire to procure food
and drink--more especially the drink--at the cost of the least
possible effort to himself.

Cake saw the look, and she knew. She even smiled a little in the
greatness of her relief. She saw she had been right to bring the chop,
and appreciated that her progress along road to fame would be as slow
or fast as she could procure food for him in lesser or larger
quantities.

"I'll bring you eats," she said cunningly. "From Maverick's," she
added. By which she meant the eats would be "has-is"--distinctly
second class, quite possibly third.

The lodger nodded. "And booze," he put in, watching her face.

"And booze," Cake assented.

So the bargain was struck in a way that worked the most cruel hardship
on the girl. Food she could steal and did, blithely enough, since she
had no monitor but the lure of brightness and that Thing within her
breast that hotly justified the theft and only urged her on. But booze
was a very different proposition. It was impossible to steal
booze--ev