Back again on the now deserted top floor of the rooming-house, I turned once more to the help-wanted column. An advertisement about which Alice and I had often speculated during the winter caught my eye:

“A philanthropic institution for children is in need of the services of a gentlewoman. One who prefers the life of a comfortable home with refined surroundings to a large salary.”

Though well along toward the middle of the day I decided to try my luck. Calling up an address mentioned in the advertisement, it did not greatly surprise me to learn that the institution was Rodman House. I had long been acquainted, through the newspapers, with this institution. In all these “write-ups” the statement that the children in the home were surrounded and cared for exclusively by women of education and refinement was always conspicuously emphasized.

To the wages, fifteen dollars a month, I did not give a second thought. Having bought a pair of new shoes with some of my earnings at Sutton House, I felt quite independent of money. To tell the truth so deep was my sympathy for the class of children cared for in the Rodman Hall, I would gladly have given my services. Also, I had met Mrs. Howard, who was the life and soul of the work. Familiar as I was with her long and persistent struggles to put the institution on a sound financial basis, I held her in high esteem.

Speaking to her over the telephone, I told her exactly who I was, and stated honestly my reasons for wishing the position—my sympathy with her plans, and my desire to be closely associated with the children for the sake of my work as a writer.

She was even more persistent than Mrs. Bossman in urging me to come at once—that afternoon. Confident that I had found a place in which it would be greatly to my advantage to remain the entire summer, I hurried back to the rooming-house and dived once more into the business of packing. Such an accumulation! Being the last of those who had spent the past seven months on the top floor, my neighbors on leaving had presented me with everything he or she did not think worth while taking with them, yet considered too good to be thrown away—the Press was continually cautioning persons against waste of any sort, while every man, woman, and child throughout the country appeared to be rushing around gathering all conceivable articles to send to Belgium.

Perhaps my neighbors thought of me as the Belgium of that top floor. They acted like it.

Mrs. Wilkins gave me a new Panama hat, the brim of which had been cut by a careless trimmer.

“They was throwin’ it in the trash-box when I seen ’em,” she explained, on presenting the rescued head-covering to me. “All you have to do is to line the brim, turn it up on the side or behind or before—whichever way most becomes you in the face—and fix the trimmin’ so the cut won’t show. It’ll look as good as a twenty-five-dollar hat when you get through.”

On the strength of having given me such an expensive hat she asked me to keep her cooking utensils and breadbox. And as an eleventh-hour reminder, hung her winter coat and furs in my tiny little wardrobe—all to be kept until she “found time” to send for them.

Alice, of course, left behind all the household equipments gathered by the two of us. One of her winter hats, being too large to pack in her trunk, and not considered of sufficient value or becomingness to warrant a special shipment, also fell to my lot. And along with it a gas-lamp, a camp-stool, two writing-desk sets, a soiled Indian blanket—all Christmas presents.

The little organist likewise bequeathed to me a number of Christmas presents, along with her books and sheet-music too ragged to pack. The restaurant owner gave me a metal flask containing about a pint of whiskey, about which he declared: “’Tain’t the kind a man would drink—not twice if he knew it. But I thought, being a lady, you might like to have it around.”

Needless to state I thanked him graciously. Just as I did the reporter when he carted in twenty odd books, a file of daily newspapers, two sofa-pillows, and a moth-eaten slumber-robe. The books, sofa-pillows and the robe had been sent him at that season of the year when the world goes mad on the subject of giving—give wisely if they know how and have the money, but give they must.

A few days after the newspaperman’s departure a bamboo walking-cane with a wabbly head, a silk umbrella minus one rib, and a grease-paint outfit was presented to me by the man in the front skylight room.

“I used to belong to the profession,” he told me, explaining the paints. “Now that I am a promoter I don’t need it. And this umbrella—one of the ribs is broken—but it’s silk—heavy silk. I saved it to have it mended. One of the companies of which I’m a director cut a melon the other day, so I don’t need to use a mended umbrella.”

As I was still playing the part of Polly Preston my trunks were in storage. As a first step toward packing my collection of remembrances I hurried to Third Avenue, and after considerable searching among the groceries I finally discovered three suitable boxes. Persuasion supplemented by a one-dollar bill induced the owner to allow his errand boy to take them to the rooming-house in his hand-cart. Of course the errand boy got an additional quarter of a dollar.

In the smallest of the three boxes I packed my precious new shoes and the other articles to be taken to Rodman Hall. But turn and twist and pound as I might and did, I could not cram all the objects to which I had fallen heir into the two large boxes. With many explanations I presented the overflow to Molly, the negro maid. Leaving the house the next morning I saw them, the box of greasepaint and all the rest, in the garbage-can at the foot of the front steps.

Evidently Molly had not been receiving private communications from either Brand Whitlock or Mr. Hoover. How comfortable it must be not to carry the woes of the world on your shoulders!

After the hot and dusty streets of New York Rodman Hall, reached after a considerable run by the Subway, seemed a bit of heaven. Seated back from the country road and among the trees the large house, which was of some dark shade almost the color of the trunks of the trees, appeared to have grown there—not built in the usual way. There was no lawn, the trees were not overlarge and did not impress one as having been carefully planted or pruned. Like the house they appeared to have just grown there and to have enjoyed the process.

Even the gravel on the wide driveway that curved from the public road to the front door had the look of being to that spot born. And though the dash of color to the left of the house, a little behind, was made by a crimson rambler, there was no suggestion of the artificial. It was a comfortably homey place without a suggestion of institution. I congratulated myself on having found such a place in which to spend the summer—surrounded by children of the particular class cared for in the Rodman Hall.

Mrs. Howard received me pleasantly and while showing me over the house she explained the work and recounted the incident that had led her to undertake the care of this type of defective children. Though having read the same thing in the “write-ups” of the Rodman Hall I was pleased to have it authenticated. Out on the grounds she pointed out, with considerable pride an adjoining tract of land which she said contained sixteen acres, and which she had just purchased for the institution.

That afternoon one of the institution’s employees invited me to use her typewriter to write a letter home, notifying my family of my change of address. While doing this we carried on quite a conversation. With considerable gusto she informed me that she had been for years private secretary to a Mr. Johnson Bascom, a high official of a large banking corporation. So confidential had been her relations with her chief, she proudly assured me, that as soon as the “now famous investigation” was mooted he sent her abroad.

“It’s not every girl that’s spent a year in Europe,” she told me, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “And I stopped at the best hotels, too—had all my expenses paid, and my salary besides.”

“Then you could have given valuable testimony?” I asked.

“I certainly could’ve done that, and they knew it, too,” she boasted.

“You were not afraid to take their money?”

“I should say not. They were not giving me more than my absence was worth to them. My friends tell me I was a fool not to have made them pay me more—when you are young you haven’t got much sense. I thought if I could spend a year abroad I’d be IT.”

“Odd variety of IT to be second in command of an institution for young children!” was my mental comment, and I turned back to pecking on her typewriter.

That evening after eight o’clock I passed through the pantry on my way to the village to mail my letter. The man who was washing dishes, work that I would have to do the next day, was still hard at work. He told me that it would be more than an hour before he would finish.

Overtaking one of the attendants also on her way to the village, and finding her a companionable woman, I joined her. During our walk she told me that our fellow workers had looked me over, and decided that I “might” remain two days. That nettled me a bit, and I assured her of my intention to remain several weeks, perhaps the entire summer.

She inquired if Mrs. Howard had given me the schedule of my work.work. It so happened that an assistant had handed me two typed pages just as I was leaving to mail my letters. Though at first sight it did seem formidable I felt sure that by a little systematizing it would be well within my strength. Indeed my faith in Mrs. Howard was such that I resented the suggestion that she would overtax any worker.

Turning the conversation I soon learned that my companion was the widow of a well-known college professor. She had been “enticed,” she said, by an advertisement similar to the one I had answered.

“I did try to be careful,” she assured me, “because giving up the little I had in the way of a home meant so much to me. Once before I had been tricked by a woman. This time, to make sure that everything was all right, I came out to Rodman Hall and talked with Mrs. Howard. The place is so beautiful and that woman talked so fair I felt sure that I had found a comfortable home with congenial work for the balance of my life.” She shook her head, was silent for a few seconds, then added: “If I could I would leave to-morrow. As it is I’ve just got to stick it out until I get money enough to pay my way back to the West to my people.”

“But the other women!” I remonstrated, convinced that the woman was exaggerating conditions. “Surely refined, educated women——”

“Educated!” she scoffed. “Excepting Miss —— (naming the woman with whom I had talked) I don’t believe a one of them can do more than write her name. They are all foreigners. Do you know who she is?”

Admitting unwillingly that this woman had told me of having been the secretary of a man mixed up in some financial scandal, I added:

“But surely you don’t imagine that Mrs. Howard knows.”

“Don’t imagine she knows! I know she knows,” the clergyman’s widow declared. “That woman is one of Mrs. Howard’s standbys. Being an educated woman and fairly presentable, Mrs. Howard pushes her forward on any and all occasions. Did Mrs. Howard introduce you to any of the nurses?”

I shook my head.

“Of course not. She wants to keep up as long as possible her idea about the children being cared for by gentlewomen!” The scorn with which she pronounced gentlewomen! “The nurses are regular Irish biddies, every one of them.”

Much to my surprise on returning from the village a few minutes before nine I discovered that the sheets had been taken off my bed. They were not in the room. As everybody in the house appeared to be asleep and I did not care to awaken them, sleeping without sheets was my only alternative. The mattress did not look any too fresh, so I covered it with my two extra nighties.

My room proved to be a little hot-box. Finally I dozed off and was suddenly awakened by a mighty banging and beating. The night-watchman was cleaning up the kitchen, which was next my room, and he informed me that he had to do it every night between twelve and two. Once he had finished I again dropped off to sleep.

Another mighty thumping and bumping brought me straight up in bed. The man who tended the furnace was busy getting it ready for the cook. It was only a little after four o’clock, but being light out-of-doors I decided to get up. It was then that I discovered that I was expected, as a matter of course, to wash my face and do any other bathing of which I might feel the need, in the kitchen-sink.

“Evidently,” I remarked to myself, “when a gentlewoman meets with reverses she not only loses her sense of modesty, but her desire to keep herself clean. What next?”

After sweeping and dusting the piazzas, the parlor, the schoolrooms, the reception-room, and the stairs, as per schedule, I entered the boys’ dormitory. While downstairs I had heard a voice that seemed to my ears very like that of Mrs. Howard scolding some one. Now I found her in this dormitory where three nurses were getting the more helpless of the boys out of bed and dressing them.

She, Mrs. Howard, reminded me of an ill-tempered dog barking, snarling, snapping at everything in sight. When I entered the dormitory she left off nagging the three nurses and turned on me.

“You’re not beginning very well this morning, Miss Porter,” she snarled.

As it had been some little time since I had looked at the clock I did not know but what I might be a little late in reaching that dormitory. But I did know that I had been working like a horse since before five-thirty. Not caring to have words with any one, Mrs. Howard least of all, I passed on into the adjoining sleeping-porch.

Here I began by picking up the night-clothes of the children who, already up and out, had dropped them on the floor. This done I opened up the beds—all of them wet and two of them soiled.

Because of a state law, articles in such a condition cannot be sent to a laundry—they must first be rinsed and dried. I was just beginning the unpleasant task of rinsing preparatory to carrying them, mattresses and bedclothes, to hang on the lines in the back yard, when Mrs. Howard entered.

“You’re not beginning very well this morning, Miss Porter,” she again told me, and her tone was unmistakably intended to be insulting.

My respect for Mrs. Howard was sincere. Though I had been at Rodman Hall less than twenty-four hours I had seen enough to feel convinced that the children were all well fed, comfortably housed and clothed, and tenderly mothered. The discomforts of my room and the huge amount of work scheduled for me were matters of secondary importance. I felt sure that by a judicious use of patience and tact both would be altered to my satisfaction. Determined not to be drawn into a dispute with a woman for whom I had such sincere respect, I held my tongue. But as I continued to work I couldn’t help wondering what had happened that could make her so far forget herself.

“Where were you last night?” she demanded, and glancing up I found her following close at my heels. “You were not in your room at nine o’clock. I took the sheets off your bed. Where were you?”

A child could have knocked me down, I was so amazed. That Mrs. Howard should use such an insulting tone when addressing me was enough of a shock. That she would be guilty of such an act of spiteful tyranny as taking the sheets off the bed of an employee was unbelievable. I stared at her, stupidly silent.

“And you’re not beginning so well, now, are you?” she repeated a third time, and if possible her tone was even more insultingly taunting.

That loosened my tongue.

“I may not have begun so well, Mrs. Howard,” I told her as I unbuttoned my apron. “But I shall improve as I go along.”

Having taken off my apron I handed it to her.

“What is this for?” she demanded, staring at the apron. “What do you mean by this?”

“It means that you are to send me to the nearest railroad-station, and at once.”

Then I told her what I thought of her, and my words came straight from the shoulder. I reminded her that she had hired me as a gentlewoman, yet she had not provided me a place in which I could so much as bathe in privacy. If she had not sufficient money to pay decent wages to workers, I asked why she had bought that additional ten acres of land. I reminded her that she already had more land than could be used by the class of children cared for at Rodman Hall.

Furthermore, I told her that if ever I saw her advertisement, similar to the one by which she had trapped the professor’s widow and myself, I would go to see the owner of the newspaper in which it appeared. I would show the schedule of work she had mapped out for me, tell him of other women whom she had decoyed, and ask why he published the advertisements of such fakers.

It was then that Mrs. Howard did everything except offer bodily violence to induce me to return that schedule.

On returning to New York I took the schedule at once to a reputable agency for domestic servants. Pretending that I was acting in behalf of a friend who lived in the country, I showed the two typed pages to the manager, and asked for a maid who would do that work for fifteen dollars a month. The manager glared at me. She assured me that it was impossible for one woman to do so much work even in a twenty-four-hour day. She didn’t exactly show me the door, but the manner in which she looked at it was pointed.

At the next agency the manager was more polite. She advised me to induce my friend to get three girls. Even then, she explained, my friend would have to pay the girls at least twenty dollars a month each.

“We don’t have as many greenhorns coming over as we used to,” she told me, “and even those we do have demand more money. Twenty dollars a month is very little these days even for the poorest servant.”

The woman in charge at the next agency brusquely informed me that she had too much respect for herself to offer such a job to any girl, even the most ignorant immigrant. My friend, she added, should be forced to do all that work herself, then she might understand why she couldn’t get a girl.

At the fifth agency I was treated as a half-witted creature to whom the manager was forced by her own self-respect to be polite. Evidently, she told me, I had no experience with housework. Otherwise I would know that it would be impossible for a human being, man or woman, however skilled, to accomplish so much work in one day. If my friend’s home was near a popular beach, or offered an equally desirable summer attraction, she might get me two women. Wages? Thirty-five dollars a month each, perhaps more.

Determined to give Mrs. Howard a square deal I called on my Y. W. C. A. friend. After reading the advertisement and the schedule, she computed the beds in the four dormitories and their sleeping-porches.

“Forty-two beds!” she exclaimed. “Why making forty-two beds is a day’s work, a hard day’s work in itself. A hotel chambermaid seldom has more than twenty-five beds.”

When I explained that most of these beds were always wet, many of them always soiled, her surprise became indignation.

“That woman is worse than any slave-driver!” she exclaimed. “Oh, yes, she is! The idea of expecting any woman to care for forty-two such beds, carry the bedclothes and mattresses down two flights of stairs and hang them on lines in the back yard to dry. When they do dry you must cart them back again and make the beds. Something should be done to that woman. I wish the law could reach her.”

Again turning to the schedule she read to the end of the two closely typed legal-cap pages.

“Besides caring for the dormitories and sleeping-porches, you had to sweep and dust two piazzas, the parlor, reception-room, two schoolrooms, and two flights of stairs—beating all rugs in the back yard once a week, or as often as necessary.” She glanced up at me and shook her head, then went back to the typed sheets. “You were to help serve all three meals, wash the dinner dishes, and keep the pantries in order.”

“In short, I was to have been parlor-maid, dining-room girl, pantry-maid, and chambermaid—a sort of four in one person,” I agreed. “If only I had——”

“This is no laughing matter,” she reproved me sharply. “The reduced gentlewoman is one of the most serious problems the Association has to deal with—how to help her help herself, how to make her decently self-supporting. Ninety-nine cases out of a hundred such women are as ignorant and trustful as a baby. That is why Mrs. Howard’s advertisements are so dangerous. You must give that woman a lesson that she will not forget soon.”

Surprised by her vehemence, I turned and looked at her.

“You must do it,” she repeated, her tone and manner both serious.

“But how?” I exclaimed, then reminded her: “I threatened to expose her to the newspaper if ever I saw her advertisement again. That’s all I can do.”

“No, it is not,” she contradicted. “You can make her reimburse you for every penny that trip cost you—your packing and moving your things to storage. Every penny. That’s the only way to touch a woman of her type—through her pocketbook. She has no heart. She doesn’t care a rap for those children except as a means unto her end—to glorify herself. She intends that institution to be her monument. She will wring or squeeze every dollar she can from every person she can in order to add one stone to that monument. You can help the Association—we are always coming up against such women. It is your duty to do all you can to prevent other women falling into her trap.”

Because I could not agree with my friend—her estimate of Mrs. Howard—I promised to sleep on her advice and let her know what I finally decided to do.

Mrs. Howard, as I then saw her, had a single-track mind—a disease more common than is generally admitted. Absorbed by Rodman Hall she had thought of no other subject, had no other interest for so long that her mind had got into a groove, just one groove. She could not see, much less realize, anything outside that groove, neither to the side of it, above it, nor below it. The interest of Rodman Hall and that alone was considered.

When, after sleeping on it for several nights, I finally decided to follow my friend’s advice, I felt sure Mrs. Howard would refuse to reimburse me. I itemized the expenditures. She would write me that she was in no way responsible for my having to buy three boxes, nor for my paying a twenty-five-cent tip. The amount I had paid for the cartage and storage of my goods, she would insist, I felt sure, was none of her business. She would protest that her advertisement was in good faith, and as she had already paid the wages due me for two days, and my railroad ticket to and from New York, she would pay me no more.

Tuesday morning, my second day in the loan department of the T. Z. Trust Company, as I was leaving the rooming-house I met the postman on the steps, and he handed me Mrs. Howard’s reply. That reply now lies before me. It is written in long hand on the official paper of Rodman Hall. In the copy that follows only the proper names have been changed.

“Dear Miss Porter:

“I agree with you that I made a mistake in trying to give this work to a gentlewoman. It will never turn out as I had hoped it would. Almost every day some one comes to me for help and the only work I have I offer.

“Dormitory work and dish-washing, it is true, is not what gentlewomen would select as a general thing to do, yet if one should decide to do it rather than be out of work, I feel sure the duties would be well performed.

“I am writing Mrs. Jones, the assistant secretary, to send you a check for $4.37.

On the Subway on my way down town again I gave this letter its first reading. It not only greatly surprised me, but it greatly puzzled me. On rereading it an exclamation burst from my lips.

Any one reading her letter would imagine that I had complained of the character of the work assigned me—dormitory work and dish-washing. Also, that out of work I had appealed to her for help. If she received appeals for help “almost every day,” why was it necessary for her to advertise in the help-wanted columns? During that winter and spring Alice and I had noticed her advertisement fully one dozen times.

Some day I shall frame this letter of Mrs. Howard’s together with her advertisement and the two typewritten pages of legal foolscap, the schedule of work.