About a week before leaving the T. Z. I had a set-to with my landlady. Stopping at the door of her room to pay my rent, I handed her two dollars and seventy-five cents—the additional quarter for gas used in cooking. Imagine my astonishment when the woman began to goggle her eyes at me, to wiggle her tongue back and forth, making a hissing sound, all the while trying to elongate and contract her fat stub of a neck. When I demanded to know if she had lost her mind, she became apologetic and assured me that she was only trying to get my vibrations. Thereupon, forgetting the biblical threat of hell-fire, I told her she was a fool—not the scientific fool that she claimed to be, but the plain garden variety.

Finding Molly on the top floor, I told her I did not wish Mrs. Brown to go into my room so long as I paid rent for it. The next day I went direct from work to the Jane Leonard House—another home for working girls. There I paid a deposit on a room with two meals a day at six-fifty a week, to take possession at the end of my time with Mrs. Brown. When I notified this woman that I was leaving her house she denounced me bitterly.

“You’re deserting me because I didn’t succeed in stopping the war,” she accused. Then she added, wagging her head at me: “I would’ve done it if President Wilson had a-done what I told him to. That’s who’s a fool—President Wilson. If he’d a stopped the war my fortune would’ve been made.”

President Wilson! I wonder how many persons call him a fool because he refused to make them fortunes? But that was not the last of this owner of my first rooming-house. The day that I moved out she waylaid me on the stairs.

“Ain’t you ashamed?” she demanded. “Ain’t you ashamed to treat a fellow woman like you’ve treated me?”

“It is because you are a woman that I am leaving your house,” I told her. “You are knowingly and intentionally a faker. It is the duty of every decent woman to make you feel that you dishonor your sex. A man won’t do it—not an American—he has too much respect for your sex.”

“It’s a shame!” she cried, shedding copious tears. “Men are always kinder to a woman than other women.”

“It’s because a woman better understands a woman. Knowing the strength as well as the weakness of her own sex, she recognizes their petty deceits and dishonesties,” I replied soothingly, while I resisted an inclination to give her a good deep jab with my hatpin, and thereby give her a cause for real tears. “Don’t forget, ‘it takes a thief to catch a thief.’ Good-by, Mrs. Brown.” And I ran down the stairs and out at the front door. So far as I am concerned that was the last of Mrs. Brown, the inventor of the theory of “vibrations.”

When engaging a room at the Jane Leonard the clerk told me that guests were not allowed to keep their trunks in their rooms, and I thereupon congratulated myself on my trunks being in storage. On moving in, for in that “home” for working women guests engage rooms sight unseen, I wondered that the management had taken the trouble to formulate a rule against trunks. There was literally no place for even the smallest trunk unless it was swung from the ceiling—the bed being too low for even the thinnest of steamers.

Besides a narrow cot the top of which was scarcely one foot above the floor, there was a small rocking-chair, a small table with one minute drawer, a narrow chiffonier with five shallow drawers, topped by a mirror narrow both ways. There was also a sash-curtain, a window-shade, a white cotton cover on the table and another on the chiffonier, a clothes-closet, and a face-towel so tiny I felt sure it would never grow up. Besides a brown door with a transom and a narrow window opening on a court only slightly wider than the door, my room consisted of four shiny yellow walls, a shiny white ceiling, and a shiny brown floor. After my first peer around my new quarters—because of the narrowness of the court and the height of the two buildings my window only admitted twilight—I took myself to task for being overcritical. Though I was paying two dollars and a quarter a week more than room and food had cost at Mrs. Brown’s, I would not have to do either cooking or dish-washing. Doubtless the meals would be better and more abundant than those I had prepared for myself.

Then there were the piazzas, one on each floor, and the roof-garden, all overlooking the river, I continued, enumerating all the advantages of my new abiding-place. It would be so lovely after a hard day down-town to sit and watch the river until bedtime. Of course I must get another job on Monday; no use of loafing when our country needed every woman as well as every man. By that time my friend, a librarian who had lived in the Jane Leonard for several years, would return from her vacation, and I would have a companionable person to speak to—for weeks before leaving the rooming-house Molly was my only speaking acquaintance.

Dinner that night did not come up to my expectations—my pet abominations, baked beans and a brown bread even worse than the concoction set before you three times a week in Boston. For in spite of my three years in a Massachusetts college, I never learned to enjoy its national dish, or two dishes. Before going to the Jane Leonard when this combination was put before me I had always looked the other way and waited for the next course. Here there was no next course. Baked beans and brown bread was dinner.

A woman who sat under my elbow—the table was so tiny that the four of us literally sat under each other’s elbows—this neighbor of mine who had an unpronounceable German name and looked like an American of African descent, warned me darkly that I would be glad to get such nourishing food before “this country” got out of the war. Nourishing! The very adjective that had been drummed into my ears while at college! Even three years’ drumming did not make me form the habit. Its worse result was a play.

I do not now recall just what it was about that composition that so aroused the ire of Professor Baker. It may have been that it proved my point—that New Englanders partake of their Wednesday and Saturday dinners and their Sunday breakfasts as a sort of memorial feast in honor of the hardships enjoyed by their ancestors when they first landed on their rock-bound coast. Mr. Baker would not agree that his ancestors enjoyed hardships. All one has to do is to read history. Early New Englanders enjoyed hardships just as the Irish do being persecuted—and almost as much. The result was pretty much the same—both peoples multiplied on the face of the earth and left their descendants a subject for conversation, a veritable snowball of a subject, which, by the simple method of rolling it over the tongue a hard fact becomes slushy fiction.

The next morning, Sunday, we had eggs for breakfast. Unfortunately I was the first at table, so did not have the advantage of advice from my table-mates. I ordered it medium-boiled. When peeled, it closely resembled a golf ball that had been lying in the wet grass for a couple of months. That proved to be an intensely hot day, but sitting on the roof-garden or the piazzas was impossible because of a virulent stench.

“It’s from the dumping-plant, where the city garbage is loaded on scows to take out to sea,” a woman who saw me hurry down from the roof-garden explained. “The wind always blows from that direction hot days.”

Being too dark to read or write in my room, I spent the morning straightening out my few belongings. On hanging the suit in which I had set out on my adventure and my coat in the closet, it seemed so full that I decided to fold my nightie and place it under my pillow.

A few minutes later a gaily frescoed individual, who informed me that she was the assistant housekeeper, entered to exchange my Peter Pan towel for a fresh one. Evidently she realized that my little pancake of a pillow had risen too high and too suddenly, for she jerked it up.

“There!” she exclaimed, pointing a stubby red finger at my nightie. “Night-clothes are to be hung in the closet. Don’t you see the rules?”—pointing at a long, printed page tacked against the inside of my door. “Can’t you read? You can’t keep nothin’ under your piller nor under your bed neither.”

Here, going down on her knees, she peered carefully under the bed; then, still kneeling, she passed her eyes over every square inch of the four shiny yellow walls. When they encountered a paper bag hanging on a nail to one side of the narrow chiffonier, she scuffled angrily to her feet.

“I’m gonna report you,” she cried, glaring at me. “It’s positive against our rules—guests drivin’ nails in the walls. This ain’t no tenement. Seems like you can’t teach some folks nothin’.”

“Suppose you look at that nail,” I advised her, as I removed the paper bag. “You can see for yourself that it has been here since before the walls were painted. It is covered with the same coat of yellow paint. If you draw it out ever so carefully it would mar the wall.”

“Well, you mustn’t hang nothin’ on it,” she told me.

“What am I to do with my winter hat?” I asked, as I slipped a quarter into the pocket of her apron. “It is too large to get in the closet, and too good to throw away. Besides, that manila bag is so near the color of the wall it is scarcely noticeable.”

She put her hand into her pocket and felt the size of the coin.

“Well, if you didn’t drive the nail I won’t say nothin’ about the other things,” she agreed. Then she added cautiously: “But you’ll have to be on the lookout when Miss Digges comes round. She don’t allow nothin’ hung on the walls.”

“Who is Miss Digges?”

“She’s the head one, the manager. And you never know when she’s comin’.” She snatched the door open, and popping her head out looked up and down the hall. “I caught her once, just like that. She was followin’ me around. Be careful about that hat now.”

With that parting injunction she took her departure. Her hand was in the pocket of her apron and her gaudily painted face wreathed with smiles. Money talks!

That midday dinner was a fairly good meal. After a good soup there was chicken fricassee, a vegetable, a salad, and ice-cream. The waitresses all wore clean aprons and the table linen was fresh. During the first part of the meal I realized an indefinite feeling of discomfort that I had attributed to “nerves” had become a headache. As dinner went on instead of the pain becoming less it increased.

The little waitress placed my ice-cream before me and I glanced up and smiled at her. That movement of the muscles in my face explained my headache. My skin felt so tightly stretched that it seemed as though I should have heard it crinkle. Leaving the ice-cream untouched I excused myself and hurried up to my room.

If I could only take my erysipelas medicine in time it would lessen the horror, perhaps prevent it entirely. Fumbling in the semidarkness of the hall I got my key in the lock of my room door, then found that I could neither turn it nor get it out. I must have struggled with that key for twenty minutes. Then going to the elevator I asked the operator if he could get it out.

“Sure, lady, I can get it out,” he told me. “But I don’t know what song and dance to give ’em in the office that’ll make ’em let me leave the elevator. I’ll go try and see.”

After waiting fifteen minutes for the man to return I pushed the button. The elevator started up at once. In sight of me the operator shook his head.

“I’ve been waiting for you to ring. I can’t move unless I get a ring. That’s a rule.” He opened the elevator door. “Maybe if you goes down you can get that woman to let me off. I told her you was sick and that it wouldn’t take me ten minutes, but it didn’t do no good.”

I stepped into the elevator and went down to the office. The clerk that afternoon was a small blonde woman, with a face as hard as a flint rock. After explaining conditions I asked her to allow the operator to leave the elevator long enough to get the key from my door—the man standing at my elbow remarking that it would not take more than five or six minutes.

“No,” snapped flint-face. “We’ve had all we’re going to take—guests putting their keys in upside down. We’re going to stop it. You’ll have to wait until Jack gets off. Then if he wants to help you it’s no affair of ours what he does in his free time.”

“When do you get off?” I asked the operator.

“Six o’clock.”

It was then seventeen minutes of three. Three hours and seventeen minutes to wait! The tight sensation in my face had passed into a sharp stinging burning that every minute was growing more and more intense. Three hours and seventeen minutes! The doctors had cautioned me against allowing erysipelas to get to my eyes.

I begged that woman as though begging for my life—for I believed that I begged for my sight. It had absolutely no effect on her. When I asked for the manager she laughed at me.

“Miss Diggs is resting,” she told me, and she chuckled with delight. “You disturb her Sunday-afternoon nap and she would have your key taken out the lock, and tomorrow morning she’ll have you moved out the house. If guests don’t like our rules they can leave. We’ve got dozens on our waiting-list ready to take your place.”

Despairing of getting the woman to change her mind, I stepped into the hot little reception-room and took my seat. It was stifling. I could see the sun beaming through the windows of the library and the dance-hall on the other side of the exchange, so I knew they were still hotter. My face was like a red-hot blaze, and no tooth ever ached as painfully as my whole head.

Putting my pride in my pocket I crept out and asked the woman to let me have five cents to telephone to a drug-store. I reminded her that my pocketbook was locked in my room, then that I was a friend of Miss Stafford, who had lived at the Jane Leonard for nearly five years.

“Why don’t you borrow of Miss Stafford?”

“You know yourself she is not here,” I wailed. “You told me so yesterday when I came in. Said she wouldn’t be back from her vacation until to-morrow. I gave you a note to be delivered as soon as she arrived.”

“Why don’t you borrow of the elevator-man?” she asked, then added with a devil’s grin: “you’ve got thick enough with him considering you’ve been here less than twenty-four hours.”

“I shall ask him,” I told her. “If he’s got it I’m sure he’ll lend it to me.”

And I would have done it had I not recalled that the prescription was in my pocketbook, locked up in my room. I knew nothing of the drug-stores of that neighborhood. If the clerk at the desk would not trust me enough to lend me five cents, it was not at all probable that a druggist would let me have a medicine for which I could not pay. For the sake of getting farther away from that clerk when the elevator returned I took it and went back to my floor.

In the Jane Leonard one of the many “features” advertised is the sitting-rooms, one on each floor. It was to one of these I now crept. My head! My God! the pain in my head. The living flame that was my face! If, when I die, I go to hell I do not believe I shall—that I can suffer greater agony than I did during the three hours spent in that hot little room opening on a court and shut off from the outside air. Even now, looking back at this distance, that afternoon—like one mad, hideously flaming blur—is painful.

When, after eons of time, the elevator-man appeared in the door of that sitting-room, he had to repeat his statement that he had opened my door before I could understand. I think that I must have been semidelirious. I remember that as he followed me to my door he said that it had not taken him five minutes. Also—this more vividly—that he refused to take the tip that, though suffering pain almost unendurable, I had memory enough to offer.

Though the first half of that night was a hideous nightmare it was not so bad as the afternoon. I could not lie down, but I rested on the bed with my head on a pillow against the wall. Besides I had water, not very cool, but a refreshing moisture to the fever of my face. Most of all was the certainty that relief was on the way—once the medicine had time to act.

This must have happened toward midnight. I was sufficiently conscious to recognize the step of a man passing along the hall, and to know that he was the night-watchman. Calling through a crack of my door I asked him to turn off the light in the hall immediately in front of my transom. He was so concerned about my not being asleep that screwing up my courage I asked if he thought he could get me a small piece of ice.

“Sure, lady,” he told me. “I’ll get it from the ice-box in the basement, and I’ll bring it straight up—not wait to come on my rounds.”

That flint-faced woman in the office had shaken my faith in humanity to such an extent that I did not believe this watchman. I thought he was jollying me. So sure of it that I went back to dabbling my handkerchief in the little pan of water that I had fetched from the bathroom, and tried to make myself as comfortable as might be sitting on the bed with my head propped against the wall.

In a surprisingly short time the night-watchman was back again. He had brought me a pitcherful of ice, not a small pitcher either. He explained that he had put the large piece at the bottom so that I might easily get the smaller ones. When I offered him a tip he stepped beyond the reach of my hand, and told me:

“My wife’s niece lived in a place like this before she married. One time she took sick and ’most starved to death before she could get us word—nobody come near her for more’n two days. If you want anything just you call when you hear me passing.”

For the first time I realized fully the blessing of ice. The little towel being too rough I tore up the softer of my two nighties to get a cloth large enough to cover my face and neck. After several applications of this cloth saturated in ice-cold water, I fell asleep, comforted by the belief that the medicine and ice had come in time to prevent the erysipelas from reaching my eyes.

When I waked I could not open my eyes. I distinctly recall that I had no thoughts, no fears—just a stunned feeling. Next I decided that I must not cry—that would not help matters, only lessen the chance of saving my sight, that is, if it could be saved. Then I determined that if I did have to be blind I did not have to be a coward. Groping about I located my little pan and the pitcher. Two pieces of ice still floated in the deliciously cold water, and I proceeded to apply the cloth saturated with the water.

As the time wore on I heard alarm-clocks in the rooms about me go off, their owners get up, move about while dressing, then go out, always banging their doors. One by one I listened as their footfalls became less and less distinct and merged into silence. The chambermaids came on. I heard them talking and the clash and thumping of the dustpans and brooms. Finally one came to my room.

Without knocking she opened the door, and before I could prevent her turned on the light. I shrieked with pain. Then as automatically heaved a sigh of relief—if light hurt my eyes I could not be totally blind. On learning that I was sick and would make my own bed, the maid turned and was leaving the room. I asked her to turn off the light, and then after an effort inquired if she could get me some cracked ice. She took the pitcher and promised to bring back the ice as soon as she got a “chance.”

As time passed and the girl did not return I realized my folly in allowing her to take the pitcher—even tepid water was more soothing to my inflamed face and eyes than the dry cloth. At last, giving up all expectation of getting ice until the return of Miss Stafford, I took my little tin pan and groped my way to the bathroom.

Back in my room I found that I had barely a half-teacup of water—doubtless there was a rule against spilling water along the halls. Fortunately, I reasoned, the heat would soon dry it up. The house was profoundly still. If there was anybody in it they didn’t come to my hall. Several times I made the trip back and forth to the bathroom with my tin pan, each time realizing that the inflammation must be less because I could see a little better.

It was a long day but I did not get hungry. When the women began to return from work I began nervously to wait for my friend. Being employed in the library of a down-town mortgage company, I knew their closing hour was not later than five-thirty. Time passed, but none of the footsteps passing so frequently along the hall stopped at my door.

One woman’s voice called along the hall asking the time. Another answered that it was a few minutes before eight. Eight o’clock! Miss Stafford had not returned from her vacation and I was dependent on the night-watchman. He had told me that he made his first round at eleven o’clock, so I set about preparing for the three hours’ wait—to make my little pan of water last until he came. Now the inflammation had subsided sufficiently to make me keenly conscious of the difference between the duskiness of the halls during daylight and the glare under electric lights.

One of the footfalls along the hall did stop at my door. There was a tap and my friend entered.

“Why!” she exclaimed. “What makes you such a night-owl? I’m going to turn on the light.”

Fortunately I spoke before she found the electric button. She was shocked on learning what was the matter, and how it had all happened, and even more shocked when I told her that I had moved in the previous Saturday afternoon and left a note for her with the clerk. She had returned from her vacation Saturday forenoon, had been in the Jane Leonard all Saturday afternoon, all Sunday except for the time spent lunching with a friend a few blocks away. She had returned from her office a few minutes before six that afternoon, got her mail and room-key at the office on her way to her room. Returned, handed in her key at the office, had her dinner, and then gone out for a walk. It was after this walk, when she stopped at the office for the key of her room, that my note was given her by the night-clerk.

The only information vouchsafed to Miss Stafford and me by the woman to whom I had given the note was:

“It was misplaced. I put it in 507 as soon as it turned up.” And the tone in which that statement was made was not in the slightest apologetic. Indeed it was impatient to the point of rudeness.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Miss Stafford told me. “Mrs. Scrimser, that’s the room-clerk’s name, is a special friend of Miss Diggs. Miss Diggs? She belongs to an old New York family, they say. She’s always very nice to me. She always speaks to me.”

“Why!” I exclaimed. “Doesn’t she speak to every guest who has been here long enough for her to know them?”

Miss Stafford shook her head.

“That’s the reason we consider it worth mentioning when she does. You’ll have to wait and see for yourself. It’s a condition that can’t exactly be explained.”

A very wise reply I found that to be before I left the Jane Leonard—a condition that cannot exactly be explained. At least it could not be explained with credit to the persons controlling the house, nor to the woman whom they employed to manage it.

Because of that attack of erysipelas I was confined to my room for nearly a week. When I felt strong enough to go out, it was only in the evening to the roof-garden, or for a walk along the river’s edge. Even then I was compelled to wear a broad-brimmed hat and colored glasses to shield my eyes. When at last my eyes became strong enough for me to lay aside the glasses, it was a couple of weeks before I dared to read or do anything besides coarse knitting—sweaters for our soldiers.

Lack of money forced me back to work. The last of the fifty dollars for which I had worked so hard, and skimped so carefully, had to be drawn from the savings-bank to pay my board. Fortunately the Y. W. would get me a job without first exacting a fee.

On my explaining that I didn’t feel quite honest—taking a position and receiving the training, and then leaving within a couple of weeks—the woman in charge of the employment bureau advised me to take temporary positions. There was always quite a demand for such workers, she explained. Now that there was so much government work to be done, she found it hard to get any one to so much as consider a temporary job.

“Have you anything temporary in the way of government work?” I asked. “I’d like to feel that I was helping the government if there is anything you think I could do.”

“I wish all the girls sent out from here were as well equipped,” she told me while looking over her file. “I’ll give you a card to ex-State Senator Gallagher. He is organizing and setting in motion the working end of the District Board for the City of New York, down in the old Post-Office Building. There are plenty of other openings, but I’m quite sure he’ll take you.”