Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall. According
to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running water to be
found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it only ambled
or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no place here.
There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often met to dump
their coffee grounds and glare at one another's kimonos.

At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair
and plaintive eyes, washing two large "Irish" potatoes. Hetty knew the
Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning "double hextra-magnifying
eyes" could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopedia,
her "Who's What?" her clearinghouse of news, of goers and comers. From
a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had learned that the
girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living in a kind of
attic--or "studio," as they prefer to call it--on the top floor. Hetty
was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it certainly
wasn't a house; because house-painters, although they wear splashy
overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to
indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.

The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as
an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a
dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel
one of the potatoes with it.

Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who
intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.

"Beg pardon," she said, "for butting into what's not my business, but