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ess. That would be there on all the nights. Each one, dumb and dead. The prospect was unnerving. There was something of the atmosphere of the sick-room in this awful calm. Miss Holland's candle was the nightlight, keeping going the hot pressure of the evening. Yet most people probably disliked a rattling window, the sound that made a stillness in the room and in the street. It was bad to be so different and to like being different.
How difficult to sleep in this consciously quiet enclosure. For it was not the quiet of a still night, the kind of night in which you listen to the expanse of space. It was a stillness filled with the coiling emanation of a humanity recognising only itself, intent only on its own circlings. The darkness when it presently came would be thick with the remainder of the continuous coiling and fret of all those people who live perpetually at war with everything that is not perfectly secure.
Miss Holland's light was out. She was apparently sitting up in bed arranging draperies at great length.
"I have not locked the door," she said, suddenly: Miriam despaired.
"I think for to-night it does not matter. We can make a point of remembering it in future."
"Have you not been in the habit of locking your door?"
"I never even thought of it."
"Strange," said Miss Holland. And Miriam began to suppose that it was strange. She ran over in her mind some of the odd people from time to time sharing her lonely top floor. Foreign waiters when Mrs. Bailey was doing well, or queer odd men who could not afford the downstairs rooms. She had never, at night, given them a single thought. But that was not the sort of thought Miss Holland meant, or not consciously. But all this was perfectly horrible.... Yet was it foolish, or perhaps unkind, never to have been aware? O'Laughlin, dear O'Laughlin. She had been aware of him. Sorry.
"There was," she said, "a drunken Irish journalist who used to come blundering up the stairs at all hours of the night."
"Horrible, horrible," breathed Miss Holland.
"His door," it occurred to her for the first time, "was at right angles to mine." Miss Holland was gasping. "He used to stumble about on the landing, and sometimes, poor dear, be sick."
"Dear, dear, dear! It was a most extraordinary establishment. But I think the oddest thing is that you should not have made fast the door."
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