he heard Robert cursing in a tone of hoarse and feverish discontent: “The God-damnedest place I ever saw…. Did they never hear of a light around here?… Who the hell would want to live in a place like this?”
He began to hammer at the front door and to bawl out Eugene’s name at the top of his voice: then he came up outside his windows and began to knock on the glass impatiently with his fist. Eugene went to the door and let him in: he entered the room without a word, and with the intent driving movement of a man who is very drunk; then he looked at him scornfully and accusingly, and barked out: “What time do you go to bed?… Do you stay up all night?… What do you do, sleep all morning?”… He looked around the room: the floor was strewn with books he had been reading and littered with pieces of paper on which he had been writing. Robert broke into his sudden, hoarse, falsetto laugh: “The damnedest place I ever saw!” he said. “Do you sleep on that thing?” he said contemptuously, pointing to his cot bed which stood along the wall in one corner of the room.
“No, Robert,” he said, “I sleep on the floor. I use that for an ice-box.”
“What’s that in the corner?” Robert asked, pointing to some dirty shirts he had thrown there. “Shirts?… How long has it been since you sent anything to the laundry?… What do you do when you want a shirt, go out and buy one?… Do you ever take a bath?… Have you had a bath since you came to Harvard?” He laughed suddenly, hoarsely and wildly again, hurled himself into a chair, sighed sharply with a weary and impatient discontent, began to pass his hand across his forehead with an abstracted and weary movement, and said, “Lord! Lord! Lord!… The things I’ve done!” he shook his head mournfully. “Why, it’s awful,” he said, and he started to shake his head again.
“Why don’t you try to talk a little louder?” Eugene suggested. “I think there are a few people over in South Boston who haven’t heard you yet.”
He laughed, hoarsely and abruptly, and then resumed his abstracted and repentant shaking of the head, sighing heavily from time to time and saying, “Lord!”
It was the first time Eugene had seen Robert in two years. Under the hard light that he kept burning in his room he now looked closely at him: he wore a Derby hat that became his small lean head well, and he had on a magnificent fur coat, such as the rich Harvard boys wear, that came down almost to his shoe-tops. For the rest, he was quietly and elegantly tailored with the distinction
