Page:Options (1909).djvu/45

 through the faucets; but technicalities have no place here. There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often met to dump their coffee grounds and glare at one another’s kimonos.

At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown, artistic hair and plaintive eyes, washing two large “Irish” potatoes. Hetty knew the Vallambrosa as well as any one not owning “double hextra-magnifying eyes’ could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopedia, her “Who’s What?” her clearing-house of news, of goers and comers. From a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had learned that the girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living in a kind of attic—or “studio,” as they prefer to call it—on the top floor. Hetty was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it certainly wasn’t a house; because house-painters, although they wear splashy overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.

The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a dull shoemaker’s knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel one of the potatoes with it. Rh