A note from Alice Tompkins had been among the batch of mail handed me the night before as I left the National Art Club. She was in New York, and particularly wished to see me, as soon as convenient.

“Had she given up her teacher’s position in the school for defective children?” I wondered, on my way to look her up. “And why was she stopping in such an out-of-the-way corner of the lower West Side?”

Though I loitered over the three miles and more of streets it was not quite seven o’clock when I rang the bell at the home for working girls which I found at the number given in Alice’s note. The stare of indignant protest hurled at me by the woman who opened the door!

“No,” she snapped, without giving me time to speak, “we haven’t got a vacancy. Everything’s filled up.” And she would have banged the door shut had I not put my foot in the opening.

“I’m calling on a guest,” I hastened to say, and taking out Alice’s note I offered it as proof.

“Oh! I mistook you for one of them laundry-workers,” she told me apologetically. “They’re always ringing me up this time mornings, though it do seem like they’d a-found out by now we ain’t goin’ to take ’em in however often they come.”

“Then you have vacancies?” I asked in surprise as she led the way to the reception-room of the home.

“Sure! Plenty of them for the kind of girls we want. What price was you expectin’ to pay?”

She accepted, with a gracious smile, my promise to call on her in case I decided to come there to live. While waiting for Alice my eyes wandered speculatively about the bleak little room, and I wondered how much she was paying.

“Four dollars a week for my room and two meals a day,” she told me, replying to one of my first questions. “That is one reason I wrote instead of waiting to call on you. I thought you might know of a better place?”

“You don’t suppose you could find a place for less money?” Her discontent nettled me, for I had more than half made up my mind to come there to live.

“For less money!” Alice shrugged her shoulders. “It means paying four dollars a week for my room. The meals are simply uneatable.” Then she explained her presence in New York. Being disappointed in the teacher’s position obtained immediately on leaving college she had given it up and hastened to New York, confident that she would be able to get just the place she wished.

“It’s the wrong season. All the agencies tell me they haven’t a thing in my line.” Then she added, with a snap of determination in both her tone and manner: “I’m not going back to Washington City—having people say that I can’t hold down a job. I answered an advertisement in Sunday’s paper and got a place with Jones Brothers directing envelopes and folding circulars.”

My interest became personal. Polly Preston would be able to direct envelopes and fold circulars.

“What do they pay you?”

Alice shook her head.

“When the manager heard that I had been getting twenty-five dollars a week, he said he was ashamed to tell me what they paid. He asked what was the least I would come for. I don’t see how any one can possibly live on less than twelve dollars a week in New York. Do you?”

“He’ll give you more than that,” was my confident assurance. “He knows you’re a college woman. He wouldn’t think of paying you less than fifteen, maybe twenty. If you will let me pay for my breakfast——”

“Don’t you do it,” Alice interrupted, grabbing me by the arm. “The bread is stale and cold, the butter is uneatable, the coffee is not coffee at all, and the milk is skimmed until it is a blue-green. You won’t be able to eat a thing, and they’ll charge you thirty cents for it.”

While thirty cents did not, at that time, seem to me a great price to pay for a breakfast, stale bread and blue-green milk was not tempting. Though my plans had never included a second person, it now occurred to me that if Alice wished to join me she might be of real assistance as well as a pleasant companion.

“Wonderful!” she exclaimed, on hearing my explanation. “If we can only stick it out through the Christmas rush you’ll get material for no end of stories. I’ve always wanted to see just what the Christmas rush is like in a popular New York store.”

Alice was about twenty-three and small. Like many small women, she was continually standing on her dignity. And like many men and more women, the first of their family to attain a college degree, she was perpetually bringing the fact of having that degree before her associates. She was the best example I have ever seen of beauty without symmetry. Her dark hair was stringy, her face was long, her upper lip short, showing a glint of teeth, her brows were straight and dark, her lashes short and dark, her nose long and her dark complexion blotchy. She had but one really fine feature—eyes, blue-gray in color and eloquently expressive. Because of her eyes she must always be a noticeably attractive woman.

On leaving her I walked across town to the Central Branch of the Y. W. C. A., and after getting a satisfying breakfast for fifteen cents I asked the price of rooms. The cheapest rate was sixty-five cents the night with two in a room. Clutching my pocketbook I hurried out—the purchasing power of five dollars might not be so great as it had appeared.

A subway train set me down at the entrance of a large department store whose advertisement for salesladies in that morning’s paper had attracted my attention. The advertisement read “experience unnecessary” and I knew the head of the firm to be one of the most widely known philanthropists in the country.

In the employment department of this great store I stared at the voluminous application-blank given me to fill out. My age, color, nationality, my mother’s maiden name, my father’s profession. Were my parents living or dead. My own personal history for the past ten years. The names and addresses of two property-owners who would vouch for me.

“Ah!” I congratulated myself, on reading this last item. “The superintendent has his eye on you for a good position at a fat salary.”

On returning the paper with all the questions truthfully answered the girl at the window informed me that they would drop me a card in a day or so telling me when to come to work. A glow of satisfied pride swept over me. Who said an unskilled woman had a hard time earning an honest living in New York? Alice hadn’t found it difficult to get a job at a living wage. I was sure of one. However, no use loafing.

It was past ten o’clock when I applied at a mail-order house advertising for addressers.

“Any experience?” was the only question asked by the kindly little manager.

Who has not addressed envelopes? It proved to be piece-work in a well-lighted, comfortably heated loft. At five o’clock that afternoon I had finished one thousand envelopes and thereby earned one dollar and a quarter—it being three-line work. On leaving the building the problem of where to spend the night faced me. A thought of the municipal lodging-house for women again occurred to me, but recalling that I was a working woman, not an investigator, and as Polly Preston would know nothing about such a place, I pushed the suggestion aside. Returning to the Y. W. C. A., I meekly asked for a bed in a sixty-five-cent room.

My roommate was an oldish young lady who confided to me that she had come from a small town in the Middle West to take a position with the Metropolitan Opera Company. She had no acquaintance with the manager or any member of the company. Indeed I could not learn that she had an acquaintance in New York City. Her confidence was nothing short of sublime. While she might not get a leading rÔle, never having studied abroad, she assured me that she had a hunch that she would get an important part—far above the chorus.

All the evening and far into the night, when she was not singing the latest ragtime she was crowing like a hen. She called it exercising her upper register. Having spent one year as a student in a conservatory of music I knew from experience the only thing to do was to let her find out conditions for herself.

The following day by writing steadily from eight to six I managed to address fifteen hundred envelopes. The companionship of the six women who shared the long table with me was diverting. Before the day was half gone each of the five had confided to all within reach of her voice her personal history and reason for working. During the lunch-hour the sixth woman continued to write, nibbling from time to time at an apple and what appeared to be a slice of dry bread. Finally she inquired if I were married.

“You’re lucky,” she congratulated me. “If I could make sure my four children would be took care of I’d put myself to sleep and never wake up.”

“How about your husband?” was my horrified rejoinder.

“He’s gone,” she replied with a quavering little chuckle. “When our fifth baby came he left.” After a pause she added: “Maybe he wouldn’t have gone if he’d a-knowd it was goin’ to die so soon.” Another pause. Then wistfully: “Maybe he would—never no countin’ on a man.”

The next day at eleven the little manager informed us that having finished all the envelopes he would have no further need of our services until time to send out their spring catalogues. Having received a post-card from the department store telling me to report ready for work at eight-thirty the following Monday morning, this abrupt ending of my first job caused me no regret.

Deciding to devote the afternoon to looking for rooms, I hurried back to the Y. W. C. A. and approached the woman in charge of the Rooming Bureau. When she learned that my limit was two dollars and a half a week she shook her head. She had not had a room as low as that in at least two years. So late in the season and two rooms on the same floor? Impossible! When I reminded her of newspapers and magazine articles advising working women on the economic division of their wages her face crinkled into a smile.

“Those people find out the wage of the average working girl—some don’t even take that trouble—then they sit at their desks and divide it up for her. Sometimes they make real touching stories. I’ve often wondered how much they are paid.” She looked me over. “Perhaps you can tell me? You are a writer.”

The attack was so unexpected that I actually stuttered. When I asked why she had made such a guess she replied indifferently:

“Only a professional social investigator or a writer could be so ignorant and at the same time so cock-sure. You are not a social investigator. At least I never saw one whose shoes were so clean this late in the week.”

On my making a full confession her interest was aroused. When she was convinced that Alice and I purposed to live on our earnings she turned her catalogue of rooms over to me. Selecting twenty of what appeared to me to be the most desirable addresses I set out.

It was after three o’clock when the door at the last address on my list closed behind me. The cheapest room I had seen was three dollars and a half a week. Its only window opened on a shaft and there was no heat of any sort. In an effort to bolster up my flagging spirits I became defiantly independent.

Why confine myself to the Y. W. C. A. list? I had passed a number of attractive-looking houses with the sign “furnished rooms” out. Why not investigate them? Alice and I were both old enough, had sufficient experience and judgment, to see if anything was amiss.

Just off one of the most beautiful squares in New York I came upon an unusually attractive-looking house with a furnished-room sign out. Even the sign itself was neater and more cheerful-appearing than any that had previously attracted my attention. The door was opened by the landlady. It was a charming room—on the second floor with a huge bay window—that overlooked a well-kept back yard. The bathroom was on the same floor, and in a little private hall just outside the door of the room there was a gas-stove with two burners.

On learning that the rent was three dollars the week, including gas for cooking, I opened my pocketbook to pay a week advance.

“Emily.”

Quickly turning toward the door from which direction the call appeared to come, I as quickly remembered that my mother had been in her grave more than fourteen years. Without thought, moved entirely by instinct, I slipped by the woman and out of the room. Halting on the stairs between her and the door I explained that it seemed to me wiser to consult Alice before definitely deciding.

Out on the streets my cheeks tingled with shame. Was I a fool or a coward or both? There had been nothing suspicious about the woman and certainly her house was more attractive than any on the Y. W. list. Out there in the sunlight it seemed the height of absurdity to imagine that my mother had spoken to me. Deciding to telephone Alice and ask her to meet me at the house on her way from work I turned toward Third Avenue to look for the nearest drug-store.

Discovering that I was almost under the eaves of a home for deaconesses, it occurred to me that they might have a list of decent rooming-houses in that neighborhood. At any rate, I reasoned, they would certainly be in a position to reassure me about the house I had just left.

While the little deaconess who opened the door was going over her list of rooms looking for a vacancy, I mentioned having called at a house on that block, giving the number.

“Oh, my dear!” she exclaimed. “You mustn’t think of going there. That house has been raided by the police three times within the past month.”

When at last she found a rooming-house on her list not marked “filled” she gave me the address. Within half an hour I had taken and paid for exactly what Alice and I had set our hearts on—two small clean rooms on the top floor in the back of an old-fashioned house in a convenient and decent neighborhood.

“Of course we shall have to keep our living expenses within what you are now paying,” I told Alice that evening, when she stopped in on her way from work. “Two dollars and a half each a week for rent and one dollar and a half each for our household budget. It would have been nicer if you could have moved to-night.”

“I’d have come quick enough,” Alice retorted. “You told me not to dare to come before Tuesday.”

“Certainly. You have paid until Tuesday noon. You cannot afford to give that home the price of five meals and three nights’ room-rent. We are out to learn the value of money, not how to spend it.”

“I don’t believe we’ll get very much to spend,” Alice replied despondently. “Everything in New York seems very expensive. Maybe the food they give us at the Home is as good as——”

“Stop it! If you knew the price of foodstuffs in the push-cart markets you’d know that three dollars a week will give two women all they can eat—provided they do their own cooking and use common sense in buying.”

“Will you do the buying for the first week?” Alice demanded.

“No indeed. No weekly shifts for me—either as a buyer or as a cook. A month is the shortest period one should attempt when economy is to be considered. I have thought it all out. The one who does the buying cooks dinner and washes up the breakfast dishes. The other washes the dinner dishes and cooks breakfast. How does that suit you?”

“I’m willing to do the work,” Alice assured me. “But I believe we’ll starve to death if we don’t put in more than a dollar and a half a week for food.”

“I was forgetting to tell you about my adventure,” I said, hoping to give her a change of thought and thereby stop her croaking. “It was really exciting.” I then described my experience at the unlisted rooming-house and the deaconess home.

“How comforting it is to know that the spirits of our loved ones are always hovering around us, guarding us from harm!” she commented solemnly. “After such a direct manifestation—What!” she cried, interrupting herself as she realized the significance of my smile. “Do you mean to say that you don’t believe your mother could come to warn you?”

“I know nothing about would or could, but I don’t believe she did. What you call a direct manifestation seems to me merely a vestigial faculty inherited from our remote ancestors—who, not yet having developed the orderly, conscious mind, existed by means of powers akin to instinct of animals. It may not be very flattering to think of one’s ancestors as the missing link, but I prefer it to the suspicion that the spirit of my mother has nothing better to do than to chase around after me.”

For a few minutes there was a profound silence. Then Alice began to snap and unsnap the fastening of her glove while I continued to polish my shoes.

“Well,” my friend began with a sigh, “of course every one has a right to their own opinion. I don’t believe in the missing-link theory. What’s more, I do believe in a hereafter and that I shall be able to come back and help the people I love.”

“Don’t forget the parable of Lazarus and Dives,” I cautioned her, as I stored the bottle of shoe-polish on the shelf of my tiny wardrobe. “In that parable it is made very plain that as the brothers of Dives had not heeded the teachings of Moses and the prophets they would pay no attention to Lazarus risen from the dead. My plans for the next world do not include any time or thought devoted to the interest of my friends.”

Alice dragged her chair nearer to mine and looked eagerly into my face.

“Tell me,” she asked breathlessly. “What do you plan to do? What is the very first thing you plan to do when you step behind the curtain of now?”

“Get Mr. Shakespeare and Lord Bacon in a corner and make the old codgers tell me who really did write the plays.”

Unable to keep my face straight a moment longer I hurried across the hall and turned on the water in the bathtub. Returning to the room a few minutes later it was evident from the prim set of Alice’s lips that she had decided to overlook my levity. What had come over the girl?—I wondered. Why had she suddenly become such a killjoy?

“You haven’t asked me about my salary,” she said, almost as though in reply to my questions. “This was pay-day.”

“How much did you get?” My eagerness was not assumed. “You will remember my telling you that you’d get a good salary. How much?”

“Eight dollars.”

“What?” The next instant it dawned on me that she was jesting. “Oh, I see! Eight dollars a day. Do they pay you forty-eight or fifty-six a week?”

There was a pause, then she glanced up at me with a little twisted smile.

“Eight dollars a week.” Answering my continued speechless stare she added: “All the other girls got seven—I saw their envelopes. Some of them have been working there more than a year. Evidently,” she said bitterly, “that one dollar is a concession to my college degree.”

Taking my seat on the foot of the bed I stared through the window at the torch flaming on the top of the Metropolitan tower. Eight hours a day, six days a week—they did not even give Saturday afternoon. Eight dollars a week minus sixty cents car-fare—twelve cents the hour. And in a publishing house of international reputation!

At this thought I burst out laughing. Alice stared.

“Those are the kind of publishers dear kind Mr. Hezekiah Butterworth used to caution me against,” I explained. “It was just after the publication of my first novel—a ‘best seller,’ as you may recall. When I used to grow enthusiastic about my publishers, Mr. Butterworth would remind me: ‘Don’t forget, my dear, Judas Iscariot was a publisher.’”

But even the silliness of this hoary joke did not make Alice forget her disappointment. Watching her as she sat silent and woebegone in the meagre light of the bare little room I congratulated myself on having induced her to join me. What a mine of material she would furnish me! Polly Preston working in New York at twelve cents an hour, half-fed, going without clothes, perhaps walking ten miles a day to save car-fare. With such a background there could be no doubt about my making an intensely emotional story. Of course, I reasoned to myself, out of the abundance of my salary I would see to it that Alice did not actually suffer.

“What do you advise me to do?” Alice finally asked, interrupting me in the midst of my ghoulish air-castle architecture. “Do you think I had better go back to work on Monday or—or go home?”

How I wished she had not asked me that question! It is not easy to act the ghoul when the person you plan to plunder sits up and holds out her hands to you. In that instant I saw all the material—the very best material—needed to build my History of Polly Preston go up, as it were, in thin smoke. With a sigh of genuine regret I said:

“Go back to work,” and my voice was emphatic. “You don’t want to throw up the sponge and go back home your first year out of college. Eight dollars a week will pay your actual living expenses. You needn’t run behind. Besides,” I added as a morsel of consolation, and with an unholy sigh, “it won’t be for long. As soon as I get settled in the department store I’ll look around and get you a good opening.”

“But you don’t know that you are going to get a decent wage!” Alice wailed. “You may not get much more than they pay me.”

“Don’t be silly,” I reproved, suppressing the irritation caused by being forced, as I considered it, to fill up with my own hands such a rich mine of literary material. “If you had seen that application-blank you’d know that I am to get a good—not wage—but a good salary, a good fat salary.”