IV
Over Tilly’s garage a bleak room echoed all day to the rumble and snorting downstairs and the singing of the n***o washers as they turned the hose on the cars outside. It was a cheerless square of a room, punctuated with a bed and a battered table on which lay half a dozen books—Joe Miller’s “Slow Train thru Arkansas”; “Lucille,” in an old edition very much annotated in an old-fashioned hand; “The Eyes of the World,” by Harold Bell Wright; and an ancient prayer-book of the Church of England with the name Alice Powell and the date 1831 written on the fly-leaf.
The east, grey when the Jelly-bean entered the garage, became a rich and vivid blue as he turned on his solitary electric light. He snapped it out again, and going to the window rested his elbows on the sill and stared into the d
