"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. "And suppose I did--'learn' you," he sneered, "what would _you_ do with it?" "I would be famous," cried Cake. Then the lodger did laugh, looking at her with his head hanging down, his swollen face all creased and purple, his hair sticking up rough and unkempt. He laughed, sitting there a degraded, debauched ruin, looking down from the height of his memories upon the gaunt, unlovely child of the slums who was rendered even more unlovely by the very courage that kept her waiting beside the broken door. "So you think I could learn you to be famous, hey?" Even the words of this gutter filth he sought to construe into something nattering to himself. Cake nodded. Really she had not thought of it that way at all. There was no thinking connected with her decision. The dumb hours she had spent staring up the air-shaft had resolved themselves with the passing years into a strange, numb will to do. There was the light and she must reach it. Indeed the Thing there behind the narrow walls of her chest gave her no alternative. She did not think she wanted to be an actress. It was a long time after that before she knew even what an actress was. She did not know what the lodger had been. No. Instinctively, groping and inarticulate, she recognized in him the rags and shreds of greatness, knew him to be a one-time dweller in that temple whither, willing or not, she was bound, to reach it or to die. The lodger looked down at the naked chop bone in his hand. The juicy, broiled meat was comforting to his outraged stomach. Meat. The word stood out in his mind to be instantly followed by that other word that, for him, had spelled ruin, made him a ragged panhandler, reduced him to living among the poorest and most hopeless. Drink! He raised his head and eyed Cake with crafty calculation. "What will you pay me for such teaching?" he demanded, and looked down again at the bone. What he did in the end, Cake herself was satisfied came to him afterward. At first he was actuated only by the desire to procure food and drink--more especially the drink--at the cost of the least possible effort to himself. Cake saw the look, and she knew. She even smiled a little in the greatness of her relief. She saw she had been right to bring the chop, and appreciated that her progress along road to fame would be as slow or fast as she could procure food for him in lesser or larger quantities. "I'll bring you eats," she said cunningly. "From Maverick's," she added. By which she meant the eats would be "has-is"--distinctly second class, quite possibly third. The lodger nodded. "And booze," he put in, watching her face. "And booze," Cake assented.