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The East River, and the bridges, and the city to the west, were burning in the conflagration of the sunset; there was that great home-coming reach of evening in the air. The car changes from Thirty-fourth Street were too many and too perplexing; for the first time in his life Hedger took a hansom cab for Washington Square.
Hedger came and stood beside her. "You've surely seen them before?" "Oh, yes," she replied, still looking up. "I see them every day from my windows. They always come home about five o'clock. Where do they live?" "I don't know. Probably some Italian raises them for the market. They were here long before I came, and I've been here four years." "In that same gloomy room?
He was in the habit of pausing for a cautious, vaguely designing chat with every hedger or ditcher on his way, and was especially willing to listen even to news which he had heard before, feeling himself at an advantage over all narrators in partially disbelieving them. One day, however, he got into a dialogue with Hiram Ford, a wagoner, in which he himself contributed information.
With a look of pleasure he pursued his self-analysis. 'Special antipathies sometimes explicable enough influence me very widely. Now, I by no means hate all orders of uneducated people. A hedger, a fisherman, a country mason, people of that kind I rather like to talk with. I could live a good deal with them. But the London vulgar I abominate, root and branch.
Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his only responsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, no social ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since he travelled light, he had travelled rather far.
So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there on hot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. He mounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned to climb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master's greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm for this perilous ascent.
Andrew Hedger repeated that it was The Crossways house, ne'er a doubt. Redworth paid him his expected fee, whereupon Andrew, shouldering off, wished him a hearty good night, and forthwith departed at high pedestrian pace, manifestly to have a concluding look at the beloved anatomy. There stood the house. Absolutely empty! thought Redworth.
Anybody can be successful who will do that sort of thing. I wouldn't paint his pictures for all the money in New York." "Well, I saw a lot of them, and I think they are beautiful." Hedger bowed stiffly. "What's the use of being a great painter if nobody knows about you?" Eden went on persuasively.
He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and he ate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmas and New Year's. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and the janitress and the lame oysterman. After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on that first Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour.
The woman was pulling the long black hair of this mightiest of men, who bowed his head and permitted it. In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction, as young people often do, as mature people almost never do. Eden came in late one afternoon. She had been with some of her musical friends to lunch at Burton Ives' studio, and she began telling Hedger about its splendours.
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