utterly disreputable old tumble-down frame house, in one of which Wilson lived with his woman.
The place is a sight. Someone owns it I suppose who is shrewd enough to know that in a big city like Chicago no section gets neglected always. Such a fellow must have said to himself, "Well, I'll let the place go. The ground on which the house stands will some day be very valuable, but the house is worth nothing. I'll let it go at a low rental and do nothing to fix it up. Perhaps I will get enough out of it to pay my taxes until prices come up."
And so the house had stood there unpainted for years and the windows were out of line and the shingles nearly all off the roof. The second floor was reached by an outside stairway with a handrail that had become just the peculiar greasy black that wood can become in a soft coal burning city like Chicago and Pittsburgh. One's hand became black when the railing was touched and the rooms above were altogether cold and cheerless.
At the front there was a large room with a fireplace from which many bricks had fallen, and back of that were two small sleeping rooms.
Wilson and his woman lived in the place at the time when the thing happened I am to tell you about, and as they had taken it in May I presume they did not too much mind the cold barrenness of the large front room in which they lived. There was a sagging wooden bed with a leg broken off the woman had tried to repair with sticks from a packing box, a kitchen table that was also used by Wilson as a writing desk, and two or three cheap kitchen chairs.
The woman had managed to get a place as wardrobe woman in a theatre in Randolph Street and they lived on her earnings. It was said she had got the job because some man connected with the theatre or a company playing there had a passion for her, but one can always pick up stories of that sort about any woman who works about the theatre—from the scrub-woman to the star.
Anyway she worked there and had a reputation in the theatre of being quiet and efficient.
As for Wilson, he wrote poetry of a sort I've never seen before, although, like most newspaper men, I've taken a turn at verse-making myself now and then, both of the rhymed kind and the newfangled vers libre sort. I rather go in for the classical stuff myself.
About Wilson's verse—it was Greek to me. Well now, to get
