The Washington times., 1921-10-13
Arthur Stinger's .:::: s:: THE WINE 9
Serial of Love,
Tragedy and the
Lure of Fame
and Money.
BY Arthur Stringer,
wsll-Known Novelist aud Author
Of Ceuntrywids Reputation.
CHAPTER I.

q TORROW stared about the
~ empty hotel room, now de-
nuded Of its last appeasing
touch of the personal. Then he
crossed to the still open win
dow.
AS he stood there, vaguely OPP
pressed by the thought of how
life was forever attaching itself
to new soil and forever being
torn up from that rootage, the
sound of hurdy-gurdy floated
mp through the hot August air.
The notes, mellowed by a ram
part of intervening roofs and
further muffled by the distant
drone of Broadway, insinuated
themselves into the coloring of
Storrow's mood and lent an over
tone Of wistfulness to his fare
well survey of those faded walls
cobwebbed with fre-escapes.
His week of freedom in that
shabby side-street hotel had not
been an unhappy one. He had
found nothing repugnant in its
ugliness, in its gilded slattefnli-
ness, in its nocturnal pianos and
its noisy house dogs, in the XII
monoed figures that fluttered
about a hallway filled with the
betraying odors of illicit cook
cry.
It had at least conferred on
Storrow the gift Of freedom.
And freedom, he knew, was the
one thing he would always de-
mand Of life. Elbow-room, he
felt, must always be his, the
right to come and go at his own
sweet will, the right to idle or
work, to rise or fall, to tool his
own personal destinies upward or
downward across the Great Di-
vides of life as he chose.
Slipshod Atmosphere.
He remembered, as he stared
idly down at tarred and graveled
roof Uttered with orange peel and
empty bottles and cigarette ends,
how the easy-going and slipshop
atmosphere of this third-rate Ten
derloin hotel had appealed to him.
It's unruffled end urban self-con-
cernment, its shoddy and casual
reticences, had provided him with
the cover he craved, cover as
screening as the hemlocked and
the blue-valleyed solitudes that had
once been his.
But now he had finished with
It. Finished, too, he would be with
his eager and unattached wander
ings about the city, the city in un-
dress because of its summer-end
heat, the city undraped in its pant
ing misery to his over-questioning
eye. ........
All the artist in him had joyed
in the midnight parks crowded
with sleepers in the half-clad fig
ures, the poses of utter abandon,
the huddled and motionless groups
making the greensward look so
like a battlefield strewn with its
dead. He had gloried in the acci-
dental grouping of half-nude chill
dren about a water hydrant.
He had revelled in the Hogar-
THAN intimate nudities of the tene-
ment districts, in the occasional
statuesque pose of an Italian girl
asleep on the pavement of an open
area-way, in the lassitude of
painted woman sitting under mid
night trees, painting for breath,
from the street lamps by
leaves so motionless they looked as
though they had been stenciled out
of sheets of brazen metal.
He had loved to stare from the
height of Murray Hill down the
quietness Of Fifth ave-
nue., where the huge milky lamp
globes fell away in a double row,
like twin ropes of pearls dropping
from languid woman's throat.
He had gloried in gazing at the