The frequency with which Mr. Penrose had presumed upon this knowledge had much to do with Wallie's delight as he had listened to the encounter.
Dropping back upon his pillow, the young man mildly wondered about the woman next door to him. She must have come in on the evening train while he was at the moving pictures, and retired immediately. Very likely she was, as Mr. Penrose asserted, some acrimonious spinster, but, at any rate, she had temporarily silenced the rich old tyrant of whom all the hotel stood in awe.
A second time the ripping sound of yard after yard of calico being viciously torn broke the night's stillness and, grinning, Wallie waited to hear what the woman next door was going to do about it. But only a stranger would have hoped to do anything about it, since to prevent Mr. Penrose from snoring was a task only a little less hopeless than that of stopping the roar of the ocean. Guests whom it annoyed had either to move or get used to it. Sometimes they did the one and sometimes the other, but always Mr. Penrose, who was the subject of a hundred complaints a summer, snored on victoriously. The woman next door, of course, could not know this, so no doubt she had a mistaken notion that she might either break the old gentleman of his habit or have him banished to an isolated quarter.
Wallie had not long to wait, for shortly after Mr. Penrose started again the tattoo on the door was repeated.
In response to a snarl that might have come from a menagerie, she advised him curtly: "You're at it again!"
Another angry colloquy followed, and once more Mr. Penrose was forced to subside for the want of an adequate answer.
All the rest of the night the battle continued at intervals, and by morning not only Wallie but the entire corridor was interested in the occupant of the room adjoining his.
Wallie was in the office when the door of the elevator opened with a clang and Mr. Penrose sprang out of it like a starved lion about to hurl himself upon a Christian martyr. While his jaws did not drip saliva, the thin nostrils of his bothersome nose quivered with eagerness and anger.
"I've been coming here for twenty-eight years, haven't I?" he demanded.
"Twenty-eight this summer," Mr. Cone replied, soothingly.
"In that time I never have put in such a night as last night!"
"Dear me!" The proprietor seemed genuinely disturbed by the information.
"I could not sleep--I have not closed my eyes--for the battering on my door of the female in the room adjoining!"