Solomon brought back the change. I took a nickel from it and told her I’d like to play the pin game. Without a word she let me pass and I got up and walked over to the machine. She watched me like a prize dog, and Solomon watched her like a criminal. Then I won on the machine, and I called Solomon to come over and check the score.

I whispered, ‘Who is that woman, Solomon?’

He didn’t know. She had been there earlier in the evening, drinking a great deal. I told him I wanted to go out the back way.

‘It’s the door on the right,’ he said.

She finished her whiskey and hammered the table with the empty glass. I walked over, took a sip of beer, and told her to excuse me a minute. I jerked my thumb towards the men’s room. She patted my arm. Solomon was watching me as I took the door opposite the men’s room. It led to the storeroom, and the door to the alley was a few feet beyond. As soon as the fog smothered my face I felt better. I wanted to be as far away as possible. I wasn’t hungry but I walked a mile to a hotdog stand on Eighth Street and had a cup of coffee to kill time. I knew she would go back to my room after she missed me. Something told me she was insane, it could have been that she had too much liquor, but it didn’t matter, I didn’t want to see her again.

I got back to my room at two in the morning. Her personality and that mysterious smell of old age still possessed it, and it was not my room at all. For the first time its wonderful solitude was spoiled. Every secret of that room seemed laid open. I threw open the two windows and watched the fog float through in sad tumbling lumps. When it got too cold I closed the windows and, though the room was wet from the fog and my papers and books were filmed with dampness, the perfume was still there unmistakably. I had Camilla’s tam-oshanter under my pillow. It too seemed drenched with the odour, and when I pressed it to my mouth it was like my mouth in that woman’s black hair. I sat in front of the typewriter, idly tapping the keys.

As soon as I got started I heard steps in the hall and I knew she was coming back. I turned off the lights quickly and sat in the darkness, but I was too late, for she must have seen the light under the door. She knocked and I did not answer. She knocked again, but I sat still and puffed on a cigarette. Then she began to beat the door with her fists and she called out that she would start kicking it, and that she would kick it all night long, unless I opened it. Then she started kicking it, and it made a terrible noise through that rickety hotel, and I rushed over and opened the door.