She ripped them down in furious wads and flung them after the suit, and a row of hats from a shelf.
Another of Popeye’s suits hung there also. She flung it down.
Behind it, hanging from a nail, was an automatic pistol in a holster of oiled silk.
She took it down gingerly and removed the pistol and stood with it in her hand.
After a moment she went to the bed and hid it beneath the pillow.
The dressing-table was cluttered with toilet-things—brushes and mirrors, also new; with flasks and jars of delicate and bizarre shapes, bearing French labels.
One by one she gathered them up and hurled them into the corner in thuds and splintering crashes.
Among them lay a platinum bag: a delicate webbing of metal upon the smug orange gleam of banknotes.
This followed the other things into the corner and she returned to the bed and lay again on her face in a slow thickening of expensive scent.
At noon Minnie tapped at the door.
“Here yo dinner.”
Temple didn’t move.
“I ghy leave it here by the door.
You can git it when you wants it.”
Her feet went away.
Temple did not move.
Slowly the bar of sunlight shifted across the floor; the western side of the window-frame was now in shadow.
Temple sat up, her head turned aside as though she were listening, fingering with deft habitude at her hair.
She rose quietly and went to the door and listened again.
Then she opened it.
The tray sat on the floor.
She stepped over it and went to the stairs and peered over the rail.
After a while she made Minnie out, sitting in a chair in the hall.
“Minnie,” she said.
Minnie’s head jerked up; again her eyes rolled whitely.
“Bring me a drink,” Temple said.
She returned to her room.
She waited fifteen minutes.
She banged the door and was tramping furiously down the stairs when Minnie appeared in the hall.
“Yessum,” Minnie said,
“Miss Reba say—We aint got no—” Miss Reba’s door opened. Without looking up at Temple she spoke to Minnie. Minnie lifted her voice again.
“Yessum; all right.
I bring it up in just a minute.”
“You’d better,” Temple said.
She returned and stood just inside the door until she heard Minnie mount the stairs. Temple opened the door, holding it just ajar.
“Aint you going to eat no dinner?” Minnie said, thrusting at the door with her knee.
Temple held it to.
“Where is it?” she said.
“I aint straightened your room up this mawnin,” Minnie said.
“Give it here,” Temple said, reaching her hand through the crack.
She took the glass from the tray.
“You better make that un last,” Minnie said.
“Miss Reba say you aint ghy git no more.……What you want to treat him this-a-way, fer?
Way he spend his money on you, you ought to be ashamed.
He a right pretty little man, even if he aint no John Gilbert, and way he spendin his money—” Temple shut the door and shot the bolt.
She drank the gin and drew a chair up to the bed and lit a cigarette and sat down with her feet on the bed.
After a while she moved the chair to the window and lifted the shade a little so she could see the street beneath.
She lit another cigarette.
At five oclock she saw Miss Reba emerge, in the black silk and flowered hat, and go down the street.
She sprang up and dug the hat from the mass of clothes in the corner and put it on.