"I gotta be somebody," sobbed the child. "I mus' be famous, I mus'!"
She arose to find life no longer a confused struggle for food, but a battle and a march; a battle to get through one day to march on to the next, and so on and on until, in that long line of days that stretched out ahead of her like chambers waiting to be visited, she reached the one where rested Fame, that trembling, luminous globe of beauty it was so vitally necessary for her to achieve. "How come he c'n talk like that?" she demanded of herself, musing on the lodger's wonderful exhibition over the greasy dish-water at Maverick's.
And that night she asked him, prefacing her question with the offering of an almost perfect lamb-chop. Only one piece had been cut from it since the purchaser, at that moment apprised by Maverick himself that the arrival of the police was imminent, had taken a hasty departure.
"Who learned you to talk that-a-way?" demanded Cake, licking a faint, far-away flavour of the chop from her long, thin fingers.
The lodger, for a moment, had changed places with the candle. That is to say, he sat upon the dry-goods box, the candle burned upon the floor. And, having been most unfortunate that day, the lodger was tragically sober. He bit into the chop voraciously, like a dog, with his broken, discoloured teeth.
"A book 'learned' me," he said, "and practice and experience--and something else." He broke off short. "They called it genius then," he said bitterly.
Cake took a short step forward. That thing beneath her prominent breastbone pained her violently, forced her on to speak.
The lodger ceased to chew and stared, the chop bone uplifted in his dirty hand. A pupil for him!
"You want to do this perhaps," he began. "Pray do not mock me; I am a very foolish, fond old man----"
The disreputable, swollen-faced lodger with a nose like a poisoned toadstool vanished. Cake saw an old white-haired man, crazy and pitiful, yet bearing himself grandly. She gasped, the tears flew to her eyes, blinding her. The lodger laughed disagreeably, he was gnawing on the chop bone again.
"I suppose you think because you've found me here it is likely I'll teach you--you! You starved alley cat!" he snarled.
Cake did not even blink. It is repetition that dulls, and she was utterly familiar with abuse.