FROM THE LIFE
settled down in comfortable secrecy, as remote as if they had been cloistered in a crypt. And thus began what was surely the oddest romance in the history of American, letters.
13
She seemed quietly contented, cooking and washing and sweeping and sewing for him. She never ventured out; she bolted the door on the inside when he left, and she opened it to no voice but his. The landlady, baffled, waylaid him in the hall with questions. He replied: "We're peculiar. We write, you understand. As long as we pay our rent you'll kindly leave us alone. We're busy and we don't want to be disturbed. For the future, as far as you're concerned, we're deaf and dumb." And when she found that they did pay their rent, and did not complain of the rain that came in under the windows and gathered in pools on the tiled floor, she left them to their privacy undisturbed. She would not have cared if they had been a pair of outlaws in hiding; she was out of sympathy with the police and the city government; her life was an endless quarrel with the authorities about the fire laws, the building laws, the tenement-house laws, and the regulations of the Board of Health—all of which her house violated.
For the first month Carey and the girl lived in an atmosphere of accepted silence. He talked to her no more than he might have talked to a ser-
[ 30 ]
