while Hedger watched the lavender girl go up the steps and through the
door of the house in which he lived.

"You're right, my boy, it's she! She might be worse looking, you know."

When they mounted to the studio, the new lodger's door, at the back of
the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs
just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old
hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and
complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular
flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never spoken to her since.) He
was used to the old smell, and he preferred it to that of the lilacs, and
so did his companion, whose nose was so much more discriminating. Hedger
shut his door vehemently, and fell to work.

Most young men who dwell in obscure studios in New York have had a
beginning, come out of something, have somewhere a home town, a family, a
paternal roof. But Don Hedger had no such background. He was a foundling,
and had grown up in a school for homeless boys, where book-learning was a
negligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priest
took him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priest
did something to fill in the large gaps in the boy's education,--taught
him to like "Don Quixote" and "The Golden Legend," and encouraged him to
mess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of the
mansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League,
the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big department
stores. 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. He had got over a good deal