528
PARTISAN REVIEW
had taken a little suite-registering under her maiden name-in a little
old hotel in the West Fifties which was frequented by musical people
and where you could have a piano in your room. She had apparently made
efforts to compose during the first two or three weeks she was there; but
later she would be found by the chambermaid lying on the copch or the
bed in what seemed to be a kind of stupor, and the management became
awa~
that she was never going out and not eating. They decided that
she was suffering from the sleeping sickness and got a doctor in. But
Ellen became piercingly wideawake, explained that she had come there
for a rest and did not want to he annoyed, and sent the doctor about his
business.
Sh'e now reassured them by directing that a breakfast with two pots of
coffee should be brought to her every.morning; and she was heard playing
the piano again, pounding the same thing over and over in a way that
made them fear she
h~d
gone crazy. At night she would go out into the
town.
One day, however, she had. not got up but had stayed in bed till
afternoon, and the maid had not been able to do the rooms. It was the
day of my last call in the country, and at what must have been just
the hour when I was listening to the playing of the sonata, the maid heard
the piano and went in. She had started work on the bedroom when Ellen
stopped and came in and put on her things to go out. She. was ten!e and
her hands, which had been straining at the keys, could not adjust them·
selves to handling her hat and coat, and the chambermaid tried to help
her; but Ellen paid no attention.
She went out quickly and rang for the elevator. On the way down,
the elevator boy said, he had stopped and gone back up a floor. to get a
passenger who had rung after they passed, and Ellen had "bawled him
out," telling him he must never go back once he had passed a floor. This
had so flustered the boy, who was new and inexpert with the old·fashioned
elevator, that he had made the situation worse by stopping below the door
and then jerking the elevator up just as the passenger was stepping down.
Then, in an effort to make up for his delay, on the assumption that Ellen
was in a hurry, he had shot suddenly down in a drop which the passenger
who had just entered said afterwards had given him an unpleasant shock.
It must have shocked .Ellen, too, for she was pale when they reached the
bottoln, and clung to the elevator door before she walked out. The boy
was worried and tried to help her; but she•stepped out by herself into
the
lobby, and there fell dead. It was said that she had a bad heart.
