Woburn followed and they climbed three flights in silence. At each landing
Woburn glanced down, the long passage-way lit by a lowered gas-jet, with a
double line of boots before the doors, waiting, like yesterday's deeds, to
carry their owners so many miles farther on the morrow's destined road. On
the third landing the man paused, and after examining the number on the
key, turned to the left, and slouching past three or four doors, finally
unlocked one and preceded Woburn into a room lit only by the upward gleam
of the electric globes in the street below.
The man felt in his pockets; then he turned to Woburn. "Got a match?" he
asked.
Woburn politely offered him one, and he applied it to the gas-fixture
which extended its jointed arm above an ash dressing-table with a blurred
mirror fixed between two standards. Having performed this office with an
air of detachment designed to make Woburn recognize it as an act of
supererogation, he turned without a word and vanished down the passage-
way.
Woburn, after an indifferent glance about the room, which seemed to afford
the amount of luxury generally obtainable for two dollars and a half in a
fashionable quarter of New York, locked the door and sat down at the ink-
stained writing-table in the window. Far below him lay the pallidly-lit
depths of the forsaken thoroughfare. Now and then he heard the jingle of a
horsecar and the ring of hoofs on the freezing pavement, or saw the lonely
figure of a policeman eclipsing the illumination of the plate-glass
windows on the opposite side of the street.
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