canaba, Michigan, you stop trying to
write the slop you're writing now. Stop it. Drop the love tales that
are like the stuff that everybody else writes. Stop trying to write
about New York. You don't know anything about it. Listen. You get back
to work, and write about Mrs. Next Door, and the hair-washing, and the
vegetable garden, and bees, and the back yard, understand? You write the
way you talked to me, and then you send your stuff in to Cecil Reeves."

"Reeves!" mocked Mary Louise. "Cecil Reeves, of The Earth? He wouldn't
dream of looking at my stuff. And anyway, it really isn't your affair."
And began to descend the stairs.

"Well, you know you brought me up here, kicking with your heels, and
singing at the top of your voice. I couldn't work. So it's really your
fault." Then, just as Mary Louise had almost disappeared down the
stairway he put his last astonishing question.

"How often do you wash your hair?" he demanded.

"Well, back home," confessed Mary Louise, "every six weeks or so was
enough, but----"

"Not here," put in the rude young man, briskly. "Never. That's all very
well for the country, but it won't do in the city. Once a week, at
least, and on the roof. Cleanliness demands it."

"But if I'm going back to the country," replied Mary Louise, "it won't be
necessary."

"But you're not," calmly said the collarless young man, just as Mary
Louise vanished from sight.

Down at the other end of the hallway on Mary Louise's floor Charlie, the
janitor, was doing something to the windows now, with a rag, and a pail
of water.

"Get it dry?" he called out, sociably.

"Yes, thank you," answered Mary Louise, and turned to enter her own
little apartment. Then, hesitatingly, she came back to Charlie's window.

"There--there was a man up there--a very tall, very thin, very rude,
very--that is, rather nice youngish oldish man, in slippers, and no
collar. I wonder----"

"Oh, him!" snorted Charlie. "He don't show himself onct in a blue moon.
None of the other tenants knows he's up there. Has the whole top floor
to himself, and shuts himself up there for weeks at a time, writin'
books, or some such truck. That guy, he owns the building."

"Owns the building!" said Mary Louise, faintly. "Why he looked--he
looked----"

"Sure," grinned Charlie. "That's him. Name's Reeves--Cecil Reeves.
Say, ain't that a divil of a name?"

XII

WHERE THE CAR TURNS AT 18TH

This will be a hom