In his room at night McGregor began to read law, reading
each page over and over and thinking of what he had
read through the next day as he rolled and piled apple
barrels in the passages in the warehouse.
McGregor had an aptitude and an appetite for facts.
He read law as another and gentler nature might have
read poetry or old legends. What he read at night
he remembered and thought about during the day.
He had no dream of the glories of the law. The
fact that these rules laid down by men to govern their
social organisation were the result of ages of striving
toward perfection did not greatly interest him and
he only thought of them as weapons with which to attack
and defend in the battle of brains he meant presently
to fight. His mind gloated in anticipation of
the battle.
And then a new element asserted itself in the life
of McGregor. One of the hundreds of disintegrating
forces that attack strong natures, striving to scatter
their force in the back currents of life, attacked
him. His big body began to feel with enervating
persistency the call of sex.
In the house in Wycliff Place McGregor passed as a
mystery. By keeping silence he won a reputation
for wisdom. The clerks in the hall bedrooms thought
him a scientist. The woman from Cairo thought
him a theological student. Down the hall a pretty
girl with large black eyes who worked in a department
store down town dreamed of him at night. When
in the evening he banged the door to his room and strode
down the hallway going to the night school she sat
in a chair by the open door of her room. As he
passed she raised her eyes and looked at him boldly.
When he returned she was again by the door and again
she looked boldly at him.
In his room, after the meetings with the black-eyed
girl McGregor found difficulty in keeping his mind
on the reading. He felt as he had felt with the
pale girl on the hillside beyond Coal Creek. With
her as with the pale girl he felt the need of defending
himself. He began to make it a practice to hurry
along past her door.
The girl in the hall bedroom thought constantly of
McGregor. When he had gone to night school another
young man of the house who wore a Panama hat came
from the floor above and, putting his hands on the
door frames of her room, stood looking at her and talking.
In his lips he held a cigarette, which when he talked
hung limply from the corner of his mouth.
This young man and the black-eyed girl kept up a continuous
stream of comments on the doings of red-haired McGregor.
Begun by the young man, who hated him because of his
silence, the subject was kept alive by the girl who
wanted to talk of McGregor.
On Saturday nights the young man and the girl sometimes
went together to the theatre. One night in the
summer when they had returned to the front of the
house the girl stopped. “Let’s see
what the big red-head is doing,” she said.
