A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Girl Next Door

It was like rain on the roof at first, licketty-split, licketty-split, licketty-split. Mr. Theodore Cobb came back from another world to his present surroundings with a wrench. The other world, of swift sudden homicides, of many many homicides per typed page, faded away beyond hope of immediate recapture. Cigarette in the far southeast corner of his mouth hanging by a thread, hair a bird’s nest, collar open, shoes unlaced, fingers poised predatorily above the keys, he blinked and looked about him dazedly. It wasn’t coming from above. This was the top floor of the Plantagenet-Turret Furnished Apartments, Mrs. Olivia Everard, manageress, so it couldn’t have been coming from above. Now it was going licketty-split, licketty-split, licketty-split, getting faster and more furious all the time. There was an undercurrent of music in it somewhere.

Mr. Theodore Cobb got up and went to the window to see if it was hailing out or something. He had to; the room was too thick with smoke to be able to tell from where he had been sitting. It definitely wasn’t; the sun was going down in perfect propriety. He opened the window and let a little of the fog out. Instantly, page 23 left its mates and went volplaning flatly across the room. Pages 22, 21, 20 and 19 in that order went migrating after it. He closed the window again hurriedly, just in time to keep the rest of “Murder on a Dark Night” from following suit. All this was very bad for an artist’s nerves.

He picked them up, frowning, patted them together again, got down to the business of blood-letting once more. At a cent-and-a-half a word, “keep it fast, keep it clean, keep it unexpected.” But his gory muse seemed to have deserted him. He had cooled off just as he was getting nicely steamed up. He couldn’t remember for a moment who had killed whom, nor why. He couldn’t even remember who was next on the list.

The cause of this professional catastrophe, the licketty-splitting, was working itself up into a fine frenzy. It was like a roomful of crickets, all mixed up with woodpeckers, and all being very busy at one time. He ran a hand through his Fiji-Islander coiffure, peered at what there was of page 25. Right at the climax, that had had to come along — whatever it was. His fingers plunged; the roller shot over to the left; a tiny bell rang warningly. Then he stopped, aghast. He had killed the wrong party. Someone who wasn’t in the story at all. Someone who had been killed last month, in last month’s story.

Out came page 25 with a rip, in long tatters. The cigarette left his lips for the first time since it had been lighted, hit Mrs. Everard’s floor with a bounce and a shower of sparks. He ground it out on his way to the door and the hallway outside. Anyone not knowing him and seeing the look on his face at the moment might have taken him for a character from one of his own stories. As a matter of fact he fed horses sugar on the street, but he wasn’t in a sugar-feeding mood just now.

It was louder out there in the hall. Like a train going over split-rails. Clicketty-clack, clicketty-clack! Sure, it was coming from right next door, on his left. What the hell were they doing in there anyway — roller-skating across the bare floor boards? He scowled darkly at the oblivious door. He controlled the urge to go down the hall and give it a good, swift kick. He’d follow the proper procedure about this, relay the grievance, although he longed for personal contact, devastating contact at the end of a fist.

He gave his own door a bang, picked up the house-phone, asked for Mrs. Everard.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got a deadline. What’s going on next to me in 6-C, riveting? I can’t hear myself think!”

Mrs. Everard clucked soothingly. “Oh, I guess that’s your new neighbor,” she said. “I guess maybe she’s practicing. I told her she could—”

Visions of personal contact at the end of a fist faded reluctantly from Mr. Cobb’s inflamed mind.

“She? I might have known it,” he echoed cynically.

“She’s a lovely little dancer,” placated Mrs. Everard, who had strong pacifist tendencies as long as you paid your rent.

He was already, even this early in the game, strongly disinclined to agree with this opinion.

“What does she practice with, ball-bearings?” he wanted to know.

“I put her in there because, well, there’s no one under her, you know, and I didn’t think you’d mind, well, on account of your typewriter, you know—” said Mrs. Everard, by way of a gentle hint.

“I do mind,” he said severely. “If you’d come up and listen to it—”

“It’s only six in the evening,” she said distressedly. “I don’t like to inter — I tell you what,” she said hurriedly, as a way out of the dilemma offered itself. “If it keeps you up, you call me back and I’ll let her know. I’m sure she wouldn’t want to—”

She hung up before she had finished, before he could protest. “Yeah, but if I put a burn in one of your rugs, I never hear the end of it!” He glowered at the disconnected phone.

He went back to his death-dealing machine, opened the flat tin of cigarettes, stuck one into his gums, put a new, bloodless page 25 into the roller.

Click-click-clop, click-click-clop, it was going now. He gave the wall a lethal look over one shoulder, hitched up his trousers, began whacking at the keys.

He’d put in a whole line of the things before he caught himself. He said bad language, very bad. Language worth a dime a word, not just a cent-and-a-half. He hit out a concealing row of X’s, shrouding the mishap.

Rat-tat-tat, rattety-tat-tat came blithely through the wall. “Call me back and I’ll let her know!” he mimicked Mrs. Everard savagely. “I’ll let her know myself!”

There was quite a heavy glass ash-tray at his elbow. Cheap but substantial. Mrs. Everard got them wholesale. It was the nearest thing at hand, and it was just about ideal for the purpose anyway.

Sock! it went, like a cannon-ball, and dropped to the floor in two neatly-split halves. There was a sudden stunned silence. Muted music continued for a bar or two; then that stopped too.

“That did it!” said Cobb with grim satisfaction.

He tore out the second page 25 and put in a third. He washed his hands without soap and water. He pressed his nails back and blew on them vigorously like a pianist. He poised them clawlike over the well-worn keys that had slaughtered their thousands—

Wham! It sounded as if a battering-ram had struck the other side of the wall behind him. He jumped a full two inches above his chair, came down again limp. He was a very high-strung young man. Most crime-story writers are. Then, twice as loudly as before, in defiance, in despite, in open animosity, it resumed where it had broken off. Clackety-bang! Clackety-bang! Clackety-bang!

It was the beginning of a beautiful feud.

He saw her for the first time two days later. They hadn’t placed each other yet, coming up together in the automatic elevator, so there was no hostility displayed. He sized her up with an open mind, unprejudiced as it were. Not a bad-looking girl, not a bad-looking girl at all. In fact sort of swell-looking. Lithe and lissome. Copper-colored hair in the three-quarters length he liked best. Nice hazel eyes. He was even wondering whether he should risk some remark about the weather to this prepossessing fellow-tenant when the car stopped and they both got off at the same floor.

He put his key in the lock, then turned his head to look after her. The corridor was empty. He looked up the other way and there she was, right in front of that hostile door to the left. Identification was mutual and instantaneous. A mutual glare followed. A sizzling glare that should have set the hallway afire in spontaneous combustion. Two doors slammed as one like a double-barreled sunset gun.

He got to the typewriter first. Maybe she had to change to practice clothes or something. The head start was only a matter of seconds. There was a warning blast of music and then sounds suggesting a Spaniard with St. Vitus dance playing the castanets.

There was temporarily a dearth of ash-trays. He’d broken two in two days. “Miz Everard ain’t gonna give you no mo’,” the dusky chambermaid had announced that morning. “She say you run through ’em too quick.” He picked up one of his unlaced shoes instead and flung that. One thing about a shoe, you can use it over and over again. This time there wasn’t even a pause in the complicated routine.

He flung the door open and stood there peering out aggressively. “Am I a man or a mouse?” occurred to him. He stepped quickly down to the offending door, bopped it commandingly with his knuckles. Then, taking most of the courage out of the act, he retreated halfway to his own. To neutral ground, so to speak. But the Rubicon had been crossed. The feud was out in the open now.

She was flushed and panting when she stuck her head out to see who it was. She had on shorts and a blouse. The copper-colored hair was delectably awry. To an unjaundiced eye she might have seemed quite lovely. Both of Cobb’s were a vivid orange as far as she was concerned, though.

“Say, d’you have to practice all the time? I’m trying to get some work done in here!”

She regarded him balefully. Up and down and back up again.

“Work!” she scoffed.

That hit home. “It takes brains!” was all he could think of. Which was not only beside the point at the moment but gave her a swell opening. Too late he saw his mistake.

“Exactly,” she said icily. “When are you going to get wise to yourself?”

For the next hour he thought up beautiful come-backs, one after the other, but since she’d closed her door again immediately afterwards and he’d closed his, he didn’t derive much satisfaction from it. “Murder by the Yard,” the masterpiece in progress at the moment, suffered considerably as a result. He put her into it and cut her throat on page 3, then brought her back to life and had her thrown off a ship at sea on page 10. Which made him feel a whole lot better, vicariously if not otherwise. But no matter how often he slew her on paper, the tap routines went on unimpeded on the other side of the wall. He had never known anyone could practice that much — and live through it.

“It couldn’t,” he cried aloud more than once, running both hands through his brambled hair, “be a soft-shoe dancer. It couldn’t be an adagio-dancer, or even a fan-dancer. No-o! It hadda be a tap-dancer!”

He could have moved out and found other quarters. But almost at once it became a point of honor not to. He’d been here first. He liked it here. It was reasonable and comfortable and Mrs. Everard was easy-going. No leggy hoof-swinging stage-struck chit of a girl was going to drive him out like a whipped cur!

Their hours unfortunately seemed to chime almost to a T. They were never in at different times; they both always seemed to be at home simultaneously and busy at their respective arts. If not, then they were both out at once, and the lesser mortals around them got a much-needed reprieve. On the rare occasions when Cobb was home and the menace wasn’t, unkind nature arranged it so that he wasn’t in the mood for writing, couldn’t take advantage of the lull. Her tapping seemed to act as a sort of spur on him, driving him to a point where he had to type or bust. And the same was true of her. She could be in there without a sound, reading a book or washing hankies maybe, but he no sooner got the lid off his machine, batted out the first couple of words, than bingo! She had dropped everything and was practicing again a mile a minute. As much as to say, “You’re not gonna get ahead of me, Smarty! I’ve got a career too.”

Cobb was not a particularly vindictive young man. If she had only gone one day, one whole day, without practicing, his feelings might have had a chance to cool off. Maybe that was the exact way she felt about his typing, herself. One sure thing, if she had come to him and proposed that he knock off for a day, he would have resented it to the point of apoplexy. The way it was, they each took turns adding fuel to the fire, so it really had no chance to die down. The wear and tear on ash-trays, coat-hangers, shoe-trees and all other easily movable objects within reach was something terrific.

But when she held up his work to ridicule, aloud and publicly, that was more than adding fuel: it was pouring gasoline. He certainly didn’t intend eavesdropping. You didn’t need to where she was concerned; you usually needed cotton stuffed in your ears. But there was something vaguely familiar about those cadenced phrases coming through her transom one night as he stepped out of the elevator. Pressed, he might have admitted people didn’t actually talk that way in real life.

She had a couple of girl-friends in there for her end-men. Mrs. Everard had evidently passed on one of the pulps with his stuff in it. Perhaps she had been asked to, out of malign curiosity. The menace was doing the reading aloud — she would! — and her voice sounded strangely thick, almost strangled.

“Lead spat over his shoulder. He swerved in the nick of time, fired behind him under one arm. There was a clump as a body hit the floor. Mercedes’ screams were coming down from the roof where the Chinamen had dragged her—”

Gales of laughter drowned out the rest of it. They were laughing at something that was meant to frighten you! At something that thousands — well, all right, hundreds — of people sat up in bed shivering over at night, with their hair standing up!

“Can you stand any more? Or have you had enough?”

A choked voice begged, “Don’t — please! My ribs hurt as it is!”

“And can you imagine? He gets boiling mad every time I–I thought I must be living next door to Shakespeare, or at least Anatole France. When I asked Mrs. Everard, she passed me this!”

Righteous indignation, and maybe just a touch of something else besides, sent the color flaming to his neck and ears. He funneled his hands, megaphoned: “Not a brain in a roomful!” and banged the door shut after him.

If she was only a man! Oh, if she was only a man! Or if he only had a good husky sister, or even a female cousin, to take up the cudgels for him! He visualized a scene in which the latter planted a punishing foot where it would do the most good, but swiftly, against the offender’s person. And then stood threateningly over her. “You gonna tap-dance any more? You gonna so much as put a cleated shoe to the floor? Just you lemme catch you!”

He sighed. Most of the girls he knew were fragile little things, totally unfit to be proxies in any physical combat. Especially with someone who had the endurance she had. Anyway, you couldn’t very well go to a girl and ask her to—

In the end he took it out on her in the same old way as before, the only way he really had. He thought up such horrible predicaments for her that night, never at his own hands, of course, that was beneath his masculine dignity, but at the hands of malign Orientals and such, that it really made a story. He jotted it all down from force of habit.

His phone rang the next day and it was Elkins, his editor. Privately known to him as Simon Legree, the Man with the Whip. A rejection of course. Well, no wonder, trying to work next to a female Fred Astaire!

“Say, you’re going good. What’s come over you lately?” Elkins’ voice boomed out jovially. “Just thought I’d let you know. Boy, are you getting bloodthirsty! That last one nearly scared me myself when I read it! Wow, what you didn’t do to that poor girl!”

“So then how about a boost in rate?” Cobb managed to get off instinctively, while the rest of his mind was trying to adjust itself.

Elkins’ voice instantly lost lots of its ill-advised enthusiasm. “What? Oh, sure,” he said glumly. “Er — I’ll jack you up to a cent and five-eighths; how’ll that be? Now don’t let it go to your head. G’bye.”

Cobb hung up, turned and glared at the blank wall. A glare that was meant to go through it to the other side. “See? Laugh at me, will ya?” he said pugnaciously.

Almost as though by mental telepathy, Blah! went the introductory music, and then tappity-tap, tappity-tap — far into the afternoon.

He had one of those allegorical struggles with himself, like in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” that night. It was participated in by his Better Self, his Worse Self, a pair of pliers, and a radio-antenna outside the open window that led diagonally downward and over toward hers.

She can have it repaired inside a half-hour, said his Better Self; but it’s sort of a dirty trick any way you look at it.

Afraid, huh? sneered his Worse Self. Are you a man or a worm?

He reached out, caught the wire, and snipped it neatly in half. “And now,” he gloated, reverently closing the window again, “for a little peace and quiet around here!”

If he was a trifle ashamed of what he’d just done, he refused to admit it even to himself, kept it severely soft-pedaled. That’s the trouble with allegorical struggles.

She came back inside of half-an-hour; he could tell by the challenging bang she gave her door. Came the usual change-of-clothes pause. He forgot to type for a minute, waiting for the pay-off. Bla-ah! blared out familiarly. And then, allegro fortissimo or something, clacketty-clack, clacketty-clack!

He just sat there with a very funny look on his face.

“No, there’s no radio in 6-C,” explained Mrs. Everard the next morning, collecting the two dollars the people on the third floor insisted he owed them for the repair of their aerial. “She uses a portable phonograph and records. You really shouldn’t be so impulsive, Mr. Cobb,” she rebuked mildly. “It’s not a nice trait.” At the door she turned and added: “You should try to meet her halfway. She’s really got a heart of gold.”

“Silence,” he seethed, “is golden too. Doesn’t she ever,” he wanted to know hopelessly, “work at it — I mean somewhere else except where she lives?”

Mrs. Everard promptly came to her defense. He was not in particularly high regard just then, after the discovery of the incriminating pliers on his desk. “She has lots of offers — lots!” she championed stoutly. “She’s waiting for the right thing to come along. She doesn’t want to do night-club work. She’s a refined girl, here on her own, and so many of these fly-by-night offers have strings attached. I think she deserves a lot of credit.”

“A lot,” he agreed sombrely, “but just a little soundproofing too.”

Mrs. Everard coughed apologetically. “I have a nice little one-room available in the rear. You wouldn’t, er, consider—”

He rose to his full if somewhat lean six feet, behind the portable.

His fist came down soggily on a bunch of carbon paper.

“Never!” he stormed. “A man’s home is his castle! I wanna be where I can see the sun go down!”

Mrs. Everard coughed again through the layers of fossilized cigarette-smoke that all but veiled the window-frame itself, let alone what lay beyond. She didn’t press the suggestion.

However, every dog has his day. Opportunity with a capital O arrived only two nights later. The barrier to physical onslaught was suddenly removed. The outlet he craved was given him. His heart’s desire was granted. Although he had been unable to conjure up a sister or female cousin to manhandle her, she suddenly supplied herself with a male retainer or familiar of some kind whom he could deal with personally. Which was a whole lot better. Not too old or decrepit, either, to make it worthwhile.

The tap-dancing had been unusually unbearable the night this male first appeared on the scene. She seemed to run through the whole gamut of her routines, from clicketty-click to biff-bing-bang! Almost as though she were giving a private audition there in her room.

He had learned by now that throwing things at the wall was no deterrent; she took it for applause, gave encores. Besides, there wasn’t much that was throwable left around unbroken any more. Half-insane, he jammed the lid on his machine, went out to get a glass of beer, or three, or even six, as a surcease for his suffering ear-drums. The monthly deadline was due tomorrow, and he wasn’t half-way through “Murder in a Dreadful Way.” He was grinding his teeth like the leading character in it.

It was while he was waiting for the car to come up that he discovered she had finally gotten herself an audience. A male voice came through the transom above the din of hoof-beats.

“Tricky, that,” it said judiciously. “Very good, sweetheart, very good!”

Cobb clenched his fists. “I’ll very-good-sweetheart you if I get my hands on you, whoever you are!” he smoldered. “Coming around encouraging her! I only hope I run into you sometime—”

Coming back an hour later, he did. Mars must have been in the ascendant that night. He went into his room quietly and heard something. Something very different from the tap dancing and the sweetheart stuff. It was a muffled scream from his next-door neighbor. He stopped and listened. Beauty in distress, he thought, rather sneeringly, and then he wondered, what was the matter with the girl? He couldn’t help listening.

“Oh, oh!” she was saying. “You leave me alone!” Then came mutterings from the man of which Cobb couldn’t make sense, and the girl’s frantic, “I’m not that kind! No! No!” There came a sound of scuffling and the girl’s voice full of terror: “Get out! Oh, get out!”

Then Cobb, who was listening breathless, heard a foul word and a door opened. That nasty word did things to him. Calling a girl that — any girl! And that kid was a nice girl! Yes, he really thought that, much as it amazed him. He pulled open his door and stepped out into the hall. A man stood there, a very Broadway-looking man, trying to adjust his collar and tie. There was a long red scratch across his face and Cobb was pleased. Serves him right, he thought.

Cobb had six beers in him but he didn’t need them in a good cause like this. He moved to the man. “Who ya crowding?” he demanded pugnaciously.

The man looked surprised, fell back another step, didn’t answer. “Oh, yeah? Izzat so!” said Cobb. Her door had opened again and she was looking out. That was about all he needed if incentive had been lacking until now. He gave her a belligerent stare over the shock absorber’s shoulder, he wasn’t doing this for her, and then gave the man a punch in the jaw. A beauty.

The man went down flat. He didn’t know it but he hadn’t been hit by a fist; he had been hit by thirty days of accumulated tap-dancing as well as that nasty word.

“Dance-hound!” hissed Cobb, shooting daggers over at her. Then: “Calling a girl such a name!”

The only reason he didn’t give the man a second biff was because he had never seen anyone get up and scramble into an elevator so quickly in his life before. Whisht! and he was gone. He left a shattered gardenia behind him on the floor.

She came out into the hall step by step as though drawn against her will. He could tell at a glance, right through the beer and all, that this had had a salutary effect on her. Gone was all her arrogance, her cocksureness. She acted sort of droopy, as if she wanted to cry and was looking around for a nice comfortable shoulder to do it on. There was a rip in the shoulder of the beach-robe she wore over her practice clothes; her hair was tousled, her face streaked with tears.

Cobb felt a lot better, a whole lot better than he had for weeks. He felt like a new man. He felt swell. He stared at her unrelentingly so she wouldn’t get the idea he was weakening or anything.

“Thanks,” she conceded grudgingly, twisting an edge of the robe around in her hands and looking down at it. “I don’t know how you knew but thanks anyway. He was horrid. I was afraid of him.”

Cobb wasn’t interested. It wasn’t her — it was that name — a man pulling a girl about!

“Ah, shut up!” he growled half audibly.

Her morale instantly improved. Her dispirited eyes blazed up anew. “Shut up yourself!” she snapped back. Again as so many many times before, two doors banged as one.

It was a sort of farewell salute, although he didn’t realize that at the time. He was at his old machine-gun next day ready to go, tin of cigarettes at his elbow, stack of blank pages beside him, shoes unlaced, when he first noticed that something seemed amiss. He couldn’t place it for a moment, looked around, even looked under the desk. Slowly it dawned on him what was holding him up. Silence. He was waiting for the counter-blast from next door, and there wasn’t any.

“Sure put her in her place,” he murmured approvingly. But his typing sounded hollow in the strange stillness. He kept waiting for that racket to chime in and it didn’t, and after a while he lost interest, quit trying. He blamed it on last night’s beers.

There wasn’t a peep, or rather a tap, all the next day either. Mrs. Everard was formal to the point of stiffness when he encountered her.

“She moved out the first thing yesterday morning,” she told him cuttingly. “I pleaded with her not to but I can’t say that I blame her, you know. She told me what happened. She said she was too grateful to you for putting that low-down night-club man in his place, after the way he came here and insulted her, to wish to annoy you with her practicing any longer. And of course she isn’t ready to give that up for anyone. She was a sweet child. You might have,” she added, fixing him sternly with her eye, “been just a little more tolerant.”

“She didn’t have to move out on my account,” he growled shamefacedly.

Victory, now that it was his, didn’t have as much savor to it as he’d expected. That was just like a woman, always going to extremes when there was no need to, and always managing to put you in the wrong too.

“I hope you’ll find conditions more suitable for your work now,” Mrs. Everard said with a distinctly unfriendly toss of her head.

But that was just it; he didn’t. They should have been but they weren’t. The strange oppressive stillness weighed him down. He couldn’t seem to get warmed up any more. One thing about that erstwhile din, it had managed to heat him to boiling-point almost instantaneously each time it occurred. Trying to work without it now was like an actor walking on “cold,” without a cue. He got stage-fright every other paragraph, went ahead by fits and starts. It was like pulling teeth to drag the stuff out of himself. Doors didn’t bang around him any more; things didn’t hit the wall. All was silence. It — it didn’t seem like home any more.

On the way back from mailing his latest bunch of junk to Elkins, he paused in front of his door, looking down at that other one. After a while he went over, stood there by it with his hands in his pockets. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “You’d think I actually missed her or — or something.” He leaned the side of his head and one shoulder up against the door disconsolately. He hadn’t suspected there was this streak of sentimentality in him. He who slaughtered his characters so ruthlessly right and left. A variation of a poem passed through his mind.

It didn’t scan very well but it fitted his mood. Not that he really loved her of course, or anything like that, he hastened to explain to himself; but anyone who penetrated one’s consciousness as loudly as she had, you sort of felt lost without. Like a sudden shut-down in a boiler factory. He sighed gustily.

Just as he was about to straighten up, he was saved the trouble. The door fell in unexpectedly and he all but did too with it. A stoutish, severe-looking person wearing rimless glasses stood holding the knob.

“My goodness!” she stated. “What next? Sniffling through people’s keyholes!”

“’Scuse me,” he said hastily, and slunk back where he belonged. No other word would describe it, the way his knees were bent under him.

Elkins rang up next day, within twenty-four hours of submission.

“I might have known it!” he boomed. “Raise you an eighth of a cent and you go soft on me right away! There wasn’t a single violent death for ten whole pages! Whaddye think I’m running, Godey’s Lady’s Book? Of all the wishy-washy stuff! Matter, you in love or something?”

Cobb scorned to answer this rude editorial thrust. “So it’s coming back,” he said indifferently.

“It oughtta be there already, the speed I kicked it outa my office! Now for Pete’s sake, stick a pin in yourself and get good and sore, if that’s what makes you turn ’em out the way I like ’em!”

Cobb went from the phone straight downstairs.

“Where’d she go?” he demanded without preliminaries.

“Where’d who go?” asked Mrs. Everard.

“That girl. Where’d she move to?”

“Now, young man,” she began sternly. “Hasn’t there been enough trouble between you two already? I call such a thing willful persecution! It so happens that she left no forwarding address, but even if she had, I’m not sure that I’d care to—”

“She take lessons?” he snapped. He seemed to be in a great hurry.

“Lessons? Oh, you mean dancing-lessons. No, she didn’t need them any more; she’d learned everything they—”

“Well, did she have a trunk then?” he interrupted.

“She had two trunks,” Mrs. Everard said boastfully as though he were trying to disparage one of her favorite ex-tenants. “A little one and a big one.”

He grabbed a classified directory from her desk, began calling express companies one by one.

They met again in the hall that night. Blocks away from where they’d last met. All the way across town as a matter of fact. Hers, naturally, was the greater surprise of the two. She stood stock-still and surveyed him darkly.

“It’s me,” he admitted so she wouldn’t take him for an apparition and faint or something. She dropped her purse to the floor, poised both hands at her hips.

“Well, of all the nerve! And right next door to me again! I’m going to see the management about this right now!” She took an infuriated step toward the elevator. “Deliberately hounding me! There ought to be some way of stop—”

“You — you can practice all you want,” he said hastily. “Tell you the truth, that’s why I did it,” he blurted out. “I got so used to it I found I can’t work without it now. I even paid ’em a premium to get in next to — where I could hear it good and clear.”

She deferred her intention of going downstairs. “Mm,” she said undecidedly. She went back and picked up her purse. Hostility gave place to pensive abstraction as though she were mulling something over in her own mind. “I noticed something like that myself,” she admitted guardedly. “I haven’t been practicing nearly as conscientiously since I came here where no one objects.”

“Maybe we need each other for inspirations,” he said hopefully.

“Maybe,” she said noncommittally. “But mind you, the first ash-tray you slam against the wall — the very first!”

Two doors closed as one, tactfully, restrainedly, yet with a jaunty fillip to them.

It occurred to him that it was really very uneconomical for two young people like themselves, trying to get somewhere in the world, to keep two separate apartments going side-by-side when for a mere two dollars, the price of a license, they could cut their rent in half. He must mention that to her, see whether she agreed with him. Not right away of course, but some day real soon.