Also, had there not been so many queer people coming and going in this
neighborhood--Eads Howe, the hobo millionaire, settlement workers,
people who had grown rich and old in their business and preferred to
live near it--Maggie might have regarded Hunt with more curiosity,
and even with suspicion; but down here one accepted queer people as a
matter of course, the only fear being that secretly they might be
police or government agents, which Maggie and the others knew very
well Hunt was not. When Hunt had rented this attic as a studio they
had accepted his explanation that he had taken it because it was cheap
and he could afford to pay no more. Likewise they had accepted his
explanation that he was a mechanic by trade who had roughed it all
over the world and was possessed with an itch for painting, that
lately he had worked in various garages, that it was his habit to
hoard his money till he got a bit ahead and then go off on a painting
spree. All these admissions were indubitably plausible, for his
paintings seemed the unmistakable handiwork of an irresponsible, hard-
fisted motor mechanic.

Maggie shifted to her other foot and glanced casually at the canvases
which leaned against the walls of the shabby studio. There was the
Duchess: incredibly old, the face a web of wrinkles, the lips indrawn
over toothless and shrunken gums, the nose a thin, curved beak, the
eyes deep-set, gleaming, inscrutable, watching; and drawn tight over
the hair--even Maggie did not know whether that hair was a wig or the
Duchess's--the faded Oriental shawl which was fastened beneath her
chin and which fell over her thin, bent chest. There was O'Flaherty,
the good-natured policeman on the beat. There was the old watchmaker
next door. There was Black Hurley, the notorious gang leader, who
sometimes swaggered into the district like a dirty and evil feudal