were their guest, but they did not
bother her. They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people
live their own lives.

The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use. The other
lodgers, who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow
"railroad" hall, were three besides Una:

A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired,
neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said
evasively that he was "in the collection business." He read Dickens and
played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his
past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great
lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law
firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the
failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all. All Sunday,
except for a two hours' walk in Central Park, and one game of chess with
Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking-feet
with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday
newspaper. Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday
afternoon, and detested him. But he was politely interested in her work
for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying, "Good-morning, miss," and
he became as familiar to her as the gas-heater in her cubicle.

Second fellow-lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas
City, who had something to do with some branch library. She had solved
the problems of woman's lack of place in this city scheme by closing
tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship. She
never talked to Una, after discovering that Una had no interesting
opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven.

These gentle, inconsequential city waifs, the Grays, the failure, the
library-woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet
so detached, in the streets. But the remaining boarder annoyed her by
his noisy whine. He was an underbred maverick, with sharp eyes of watery
blue, a thin mustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing. He would
bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in
the musty dining-room, and yelp: "How do we all find our seskpadalian
selves this bright and balmy evenin'? How does your perspegacity
discipulate, Herby? What's the good word, Miss Golden? Well, well, well,
if here ain't our good old friend, the Rev. J. Pilking