Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/36

 probably, that preserved for him the characteristic disorderly gray shock of his later years.) There was nothing particularly characteristic about his room. He had piled a number of empty soap- boxes on their sides to make book-shelves and a dresser. An old steamer-trunk held all his clothes. He had hung a blanket over his window, as a blind; and he left it over the window even in daytime, and lit his lamp, because he had become so accustomed to writing at night that the daylight seemed to blanch his inspiration. The lamp was shaded by a sheet of copy-paper, with a circular hole in the center of it, that slowly settled down on the chimney as the heat scorched it. A little bust of Shakespeare, from which the pedestal had been broken, hung above the table by a shoe-lace that had been noosed around the neck of the sainted dramatist. Carey had always been mad about Shakespeare. Whatever other books came and went, on his travels, his volume of Shakespeare persisted. He had read everything about Shakespeare that he could find—about his works, about his life, about his times. He was already, unconsciously, an Elizabethan expert, but the only fruits of his study, as yet, were several blank-verse tragedies that were useless imitations of the sound of Shakespeare with the sense omitted.

So, with his hand in his hair, frowning and biting his lips, he continued to scribble at his newspaper article, glancing over his shoulder at the girl, now