The thought of owning a house in the city had however paralysed her
brain. The house itself was worth a certain number of thousands of
dollars and her mind could not rise above that fact, so her good broad
face had become grimy with city dirt and her body weary from the
endless toil of caring for roomers. On summer evenings she sat on the
steps before her house clad in some bit of Wycliff finery taken from a
trunk in the attic and when a lodger came out at the door she looked
at him wistfully and said, "On such a night as this you could hear the
whistles on the river steamers in Cairo."
McGregor lived in a small room at the end of a tall on the second
floor of the Wycliff house. The windows of the room looked down into a
dirty little court almost surrounded by brick warehouses. The room was
furnished with a bed, a chair that vas always threatening to come to
pieces and a desk with weak carved legs.
In this room sat McGregor night after night striving to realise his
Coal Creek dream of training his mind and making himself of some
account in the world. From seven-thirty until nine-thirty he sat at a
desk in a night school. From ten until midnight he read in his room.
He did not think of his surroundings, of the vast disorder of life
about him, but tried with all his strength to bring something like
order and purpose into his own mind and his own life.
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