In his room, after the meetings with the black-eyed girl McGregor
found difficulty in keeping his mind on the reading. He felt as he had
felt with the pale girl on the hillside beyond Coal Creek. With her as
with the pale girl he felt the need of defending himself. He began to
make it a practice to hurry along past her door.
The girl in the hall bedroom thought constantly of McGregor. When he
had gone to night school another young man of the house who wore a
Panama hat came from the floor above and, putting his hands on the
door frames of her room, stood looking at her and talking. In his lips
he held a cigarette, which when he talked hung limply from the corner
of his mouth.
This young man and the black-eyed girl kept up a continuous stream of
comments on the doings of red-haired McGregor. Begun by the young man,
who hated him because of his silence, the subject was kept alive by
the girl who wanted to talk of McGregor.
On Saturday nights the young man and the girl sometimes went together
to the theatre. One night in the summer when they had returned to the
front of the house the girl stopped. "Let's see what the big red-head
is doing," she said.
Going around the block they stole in the darkness down an alleyway and
stood in the little dirty court looking up at McGregor who, with his
feet in the window and a lamp burning at his shoulder, sat in his room
reading.
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