es, drop
them in a heap on the floor, and tumble, unbrushed, unwashed,
unmanicured, into bed. She never did it.

Things had been particularly trying to-night. After washing out three
handkerchiefs and pasting them with practised hand over the mirror,
Gertie had taken off her shoes and discovered a hole the size of a silver
quarter in the heel of her left stocking. Gertie had a country-bred
horror of holey stockings. She darned the hole, yawning, her aching feet
pressed against the smooth, cool leg of the iron bed. That done, she had
had the colossal courage to wash her face, slap cold cream on it, and
push back the cuticle around her nails.

Seated huddled on the side of her thin little iron bed, Gertie was
brushing her hair bravely, counting the strokes somewhere in her
sub-conscious mind and thinking busily all the while of something else.
Her brush rose, fell, swept downward, rose, fell, rhythmically.

"Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety---- Oh, darn it! What's
the use!" cried Gertie, and hurled the brush across the room with a crack.

She sat looking after it with wide, staring eyes until the brush blurred
in with the faded red roses on the carpet. When she found it doing that
she got up, wadded her hair viciously into a hard bun in the back instead
of braiding it carefully as usual, crossed the room (it wasn't much of a
trip), picked up the brush, and stood looking down at it, her under lip
caught between her teeth. That is the humiliating part of losing your
temper and throwing things. You have to come down to picking them up,
anyway.

Her lip still held prisoner, Gertie tossed the brush on the bureau,
fastened her nightgown at the throat with a safety pin, turned out the
gas and crawled into bed.

Perhaps the hard bun at the back of her head kept her awake. She lay
there with her eyes wide open and sleepless, staring into the darkness.

At midnight the Kid Next Door came in whistling, like one unused to
boarding-house rules. Gertie liked him for that. At the head of the
stairs he stopped whistling and came softly into his own third floor back
just next to Gertie's. Gertie liked him for that, too.

The two rooms had been one in the fashionable days of the Nottingham
curtain district, long before the advent of Mis' Buck. That thrifty
lady, on coming into possession, had caused a flimsy partition to be run
up, slicing the room in twain and doubling its rental.

Lying there Gertie