Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/82

74 walked up and down the room, whistling dismally.

Two months in this little den, with its dirty walls, its rough, splintering woodwork, and the abominable folding-bed with its green canton-flannel curtain; a lecture a week to workingmen; long hours of toil over his frescoes; and those indescribable dinners that drove him night after night to dine at a down-town hotel in order not to lose his identity,—

"And what in the mischief does it all amount to," demanded the young giant of himself fiercely. Then he ran into the corner of the great red plush chair that faced the great purple plush chair. It was the corner that he usually ran into.

"The way of reformers is hard," he said, sitting down in the purple chair with a groan.

Mrs. Orr came in to make up the folding-bed. She was a dishevelled little woman in a limp, ash-coloured wrapper. As she worked, she talked rapidly of the wrongs she suffered at the hands of her customers.