e bruised
congested look of the habitual drinker, his nose seemed a toadstool on
his face, and his red eyes were almost vanished behind puffy, purple,
pillow-like lids. His voice was husky and whispering, except when he
raised it. Then it was surprisingly resonant and mellow, with
something haunting in it like the echo of an echo of a very moving
sweetness.

One night Cake, returning all weary and played-out from dish-washing
at Maverick's, heard him speaking in this loud voice of his, pushed
the door open a crack, and peeked in. He was standing in the middle of
the floor evidently speaking what the child called to herself "a
piece." Her big mouth crooked derisively in the beginning of what is
now her famous smile. The lodger went on speaking, being fairly well
stimulated at the time, and presently Cake pushed the door wider and
crept in to the dry-goods box, where her mother always kept a candle,
and sat down.

The lodger talked on and on while Cake sat rapt, the flickering candle
in her hands throwing strange lights and shadows upon her gaunt face.
How was she to know she was the last audience of one of the greatest
Shakespearian actors the world had ever seen?

It was a grave and wondering Cake that crept to her place to sleep
that night between her two older sisters. And while they ramped
against her and chewed and snorted in her ears, she listened all over
again to that wonderful voice and was awed by the colour and beauty of
the words that it had spoken. She slept, and saw before her the globe
of light, trembling and luminous, the one bright thing of beauty her
life had ever known, that seemed to draw her up from darkness slowly
and with great suffering. Trembling and weeping she awoke in the dawn,
and the strange pain that had tortured her so much and that she had
called hunger and sought to assuage with scraps from the plates that
came to the sink at Maverick's became articulate at last. With her
hands clasped hard against her breast she found relief in words.

"I gotta be somebody," sobbed the child. "I mus' be famous, I mus'!"

She arose to find life no longer a confused struggle for food, but a
battle and a march; a battle to get through one day to march on to the
next, and so on and on until, in that long line of days that stretched
out ahead of her like chambers waiting to be visited, she reached the
one where rested Fame, that trembling, luminous globe of beauty it was
so vitally necessary for her to