last, "and hated a guy like youse do
this Noyes, I'd fetch 'im a insult that'd get under his skin right.
I'd make evens wit' 'im, I would, not jes' talk about it."

"Oh, you would!" remarked the lodger. He took a long pull at the
bottle. "You be _Queen Kathrine_, you alley-cat."

So the nightly teaching began with the usual accompaniment of curses,
blows, and shouts of brutal laughter. But when it was over and the
lodger was sinking to the third stage that came inevitably with the
bottom of the bottle, he kept looking at his pupil queerly.

"Oh, you would! Oh, you would, would you?" He said it over and over
again. "Oh, you would, would you?"

And after that he was changed by the leaven of hate her suggestion had
started working in him. For one thing, he took a far greater interest
in the teaching for its own sake. Of that much the girl herself was
thankfully aware. And she thought, Cake did, that the dull husk of
self was wearing away from that part of her destined to be famous,
wearing away at last. The lodger's curses changed in tone as the
nights filed past, the blows diminished, the laughter became far more
frequent.

Cake, as rapidly reaching the end of her girlhood as the lodger was
nearing the limits of his drink-sapped strength, redoubled her
efforts. It was very plain to her that he could not live much longer;
death in delirium tremens was inevitable. After that, she decided,
school would not keep, and she must try her fortune.

Then one night in the midst of the potion scene when she felt herself
_Juliet_, soft, passionate, and beautiful, far away in the land of
tragic romance, she heard the lodger crying:

"Stop--my God, stop! How do you get that way? Don't you know there's a
limit to human endurance, alley-cat?"

He was fairly toppling from the dry-goods box. His eyes were popping
from his head, and in the flickering candlelight his face looked
strained and queer. In after life she became very familiar with that
expression; she saw it on all types of faces. In fact, she came to
expect to see it there. But she did not know how to analyze it then.
She glimpsed it only as a tribute to her performance, so immense that
she had to be halted in the middle, and felt correspondingly elated.
She was exactly right in her deduction. But Cake and the lodger
advanced along very different lines of thought.

The next night he was shaky, came all too quickly to the teaching
period, and left it as speedily. Then he