“It was colossal!” Hildegarde Hook panted boisterously, as she burst into my room about four o’clock one morning during the Christmas holidays. “My ideal marriage—eleven o’clock at night, in a dark church with only the minister, the two contracting parties, and her best friend present. And Joe Ellen didn’t even change her dress—didn’t even sew up the slit in the back of her skirt.” Here she stopped panting long enough to laugh loud and long, after the manner of Greenwich Villagers too self-consciously innocent to consider the sleeper in the next room. “Harris had on his old yellow-and-purple Mackinaw, out at both elbows, and I think—yes, I’m sure, the pants he had on were the pair given him by my burglar.” Here she jounced herself down on the side of my bed, and drawing the pins from her hat, cast it on the top of my bureau. The pins she stuck into the mattress. “Now, dear, don’t you agree with me that it was an ideal marriage?—that is, of course, since our atrocious laws force us to go through that silly ceremony. Now don’t you think it an ideal way for two poets to be married?—so characteristic, so filled with color. Two struggling young geniuses!”

“Is Harris a poet?” I questioned, as, having edged as far away from her as the wall would permit, I sat up in bed. “I’ve read several of Joe Ellen’s verses in the magazines. What’s Harris’s other name? What has he written?”

“Casey—Harris Casey. Such a romantic name! Two epics and no end of lyrics. Jack Harland says that Harris’s longer epic is the most colossal thing in the English language since ‘Childe Harold.’ While I’m not sure that Jack will ever accomplish anything worth while in the creative field, you must admit that he is a perfectly colossal critic. You do admit it?” she questioned so earnestly that any one entering the room might have fancied that she pled for the salvation of her immortal soul.

“‘Childe Harold’ is not quite in the form of—” I began, determined not to be led into a controversy so early in the morning, for I still cherished the hope that she would take herself off.

“Form!” Hildegarde cried, as though invoking her patron saint. “Form! the chief difference between poetry and prose. ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Lucile,’ for instance—both tragedies, in a way, yet each a different form. You don’t mind if I slip my feet under the cover for a bit?—I’ve taken off my slippers.”

Without waiting for my reply she hoisted up her feet and began to tug at the bedclothes. Such looking feet! Her black stockings were without toes and heels and her bare flesh glistened with moisture.

“Your feet are sopping wet!” I involuntarily expostulated.

“I never take cold,” she assured me, in the act of sticking her feet between my sheets.

“Please,” I begged, grabbing the bedclothes from her hands. “Please, get that bath-towel over there and dry them—give them a good rubbing. No use taking risks when you don’t need to.”

“Risks!” she scoffed, in the act of stripping off one wet and tattered stocking. “That’s what my burglar and I disputed about. We’ve been sitting on a bench in Washington Square since twelve——”

“Of all things! And the ground covered with snow.”

“He brushed off a bench and I am never conscious of my body when enthused,” she reproved me. “He is a stubborn man, but he finally had to admit the justice of my argument—considering the risks in an undertaking is the quickest way to insure defeat. Only a weak individuality will consider risks. Once I make up my mind to do a thing, I do it.”

She was rubbing one foot with my face-towel after having tossed her stocking on my pin-cushion.

“While making up your mind, don’t you consider the risks?” I inquired, huddling up in the far corner of the bed. The thought of having her cold feet come in contact with my flesh made me feel like climbing over the headboard.

“Not at all. Not at all,” she replied emphatically, as she let fly her second wet stocking and it landed on the fresh shirt-waist I had been so careful to hang on the back of a chair. “When the colossal idea of opening a tea-room struck me, instead of considering risks as a person of weaker mentality undoubtedly would, I went ahead and did. Now see where I am!—until this freeze came and burst my water-pipes and the gas froze on me I was feeding half the village.”

“Half the village,” I murmured, at a loss for words—only a few days before Christmas her younger sister, a hard-working, serious girl, had been forced to pay two hundred and fifty dollars to keep Hildegarde’s eating-place from being closed. Having lived in the house with Hildegarde for more than three months, I realized the hopelessness of attempting to make her see the truth, so I changed the subject. “You didn’t finish telling me about the two poets. Did they go on a wedding trip?”

“They are spending the night in my shop,” she told me, still busy rubbing her toes.

“What on earth?” I questioned, so amazed that I forgot to notice that she was slipping her feet between my sheets. “You have no sleeping arrangements—only small tables and narrow benches.”

“Joe Ellen said it was better than taking Harris to her room and to-morrow morning being ordered to leave the house or produce their marriage license. They don’t intend the general public to know of their marriage—not until they find a publisher for their first book of poems in collaboration.”

“Oh!” was my meek reply, as I wondered why she had let me into such an important secret. “They might have gone to a hotel,” was my next remark, and being a normal idea it was so far out of focus that it impressed me as an inspiration.

“Hotel?” she questioned indignantly. “That would have killed every bit of romance. Besides, Joe Ellen only had seven dollars and a half—a check she received for one of her short poems. Then, of course, as Mr. Freeland pointed out, there was Harris’s clothes.”

“Who is he?”

“Mr. Freeland? He would have been best man had he received Harris’s note in time. It was he who discovered Harris—a terrible night last November. Harris had come up from Texas and was selling papers with his feet wrapped in an old piece of carpet he had fished out of a garbage-can.”

Just what had become of my sense of humor that night I have never been able to decide. Certainly it was not with me. Instead of howling with laughter my brain felt as an egg looks when it is being prepared for scrambling.

“Did Joe Ellen know him in Texas?” I asked, still feebly keeping to the details of the affair.

“Exactly three days to the hour—that’s the reason they were married at eleven o’clock at night—exactly three days to the minute that they first met each other. Romance! Only a genius with Joe Ellen’s colossal brain could have thought out such a perfect climax. You won’t mind if I take your other pillow, will you, dear?”

“Oh, no, certainly not,” I assured her, as I hastily extracted one of the two minute pillows from behind my back and handed it to her. As she settled herself, her head at the foot of my bed and her feet in the comfortably warm spot on which my shoulders had rested previous to her bursting into my room, I meekly inquired: “Anybody in your room?”

“My burglar,” she answered in the matter-of-fact tone of one agreeing that two and two make four. “I hadn’t thought of bringing him in until he noticed that the policeman making his rounds looked at us. He got an idea that the officer was coming back and tell us to move on just to get a good look at him. He’s awfully psychic about policemen—says all men who have served three terms in Sing Sing are. Of course, if it had been the regular park policeman”—here she yawned and moved her feet nearer my corner of refuge—“it would have been all right. I’ve helped him take drunken women to Jefferson Market jail so often that we’ve got to be real pals.”

She had hardly finished this last sentence when she began to snore, her buttonhole mouth wide open and her nose startlingly like the beak of a parrot. Convinced that I would never be able to get back to sleep with such a noise so near, I slipped out of bed and proceeded to get my breakfast with a tiny alcohol-lamp.

That was in the midst of one of the severest blizzards ever experienced in New York City. It was impossible to get coal, and gas-pipes all over town had frozen and burst. In spite of the warmth of my heavy blanket bath-robe I was chilled to the bone.

I was sitting on my feet and eating my breakfast—a cup of hot tea without milk or sugar, and war bread with margarine—when I heard a plank in the hall outside my door groan. The burglar! Creeping noiselessly to the door I listened. Some creature was trying to pass without detection across the carpeted floor of the square hall. A second plank groaned.

Opening my door to a crack I peered out. The candle in a saucer which our landlady, Miss O’Brien, had placed on a trunk the night before as a substitute for the gas-jet, had burned out. At first I could see nothing. Then I made out a tall oblong of duskiness—the doorway leading to the staircase. The next instant a dark object filled the dusky space. Another instant and the object disappeared. After a short wait I crept out and looked over the banisters.

Once or twice, perhaps three times, I made out a sound so soft that it seemed an echo of the footfall of a cat on the carpeted stairs. Finally there came a sharp click that sent a gentle tremor through the house—the front door had opened and closed. Hurrying back to my room, regardless of the freezing air I threw up the little window and stuck my head far out. Approaching the electric light at the MacDougal Street corner of the square was what looked to be a comfortably dressed working man. He was walking quietly along—evidently on his way to or from work.

My interest in Hildegarde Hook had been awakened by her telling me of her first meeting with this man, whom she always spoke of as “my burglar”—she never knew his name.

“You know, I never really wake up until after twelve at night,” she had assured me. “Mother is like that—mother and I are just alike except that mother hasn’t my colossal brain. She says so herself.” Such was the introduction with which she always began her description of the incident.

A stormy night during the previous winter she took shelter under the arcade in front of Madison Square Garden, waiting for a particularly heavy downpour to slacken. It was bitterly cold, and she noted that the only lighted window in sight was that of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She was just debating applying for shelter in the Society room on the plea of being a human animal, when she became aware that another person was occupying the opposite door-jamb.

“Say, sis,” a man’s voice whispered, “kin youse see the door to that cigar-store at corner of Twenty-seventh Street?” When Hildegarde replied that she could, the voice added: “Keep your lamps peeled; when youse see that cop hidin’ in the shadder ’cross the corner go in, gimme the git-away, liker good gal.”

Until then Hildegarde had not noticed the dark figure of the policeman, so nearly did his rain-washed rubber coat and helmet match the moist and glistening darkness surrounding him. Standing there in the doorway of Madison Square Garden she learned that the man who had spoken to her had served three terms in the penitentiary for burglary, and was wanted for a fourth offense. He had mistaken her for a “woman of the streets” and naturally supposed that she also was hiding from the rubber-clad officer of the law.

When finally the policeman did enter the cigar-store Hildegarde and the burglar flitted around the corner at East Twenty-sixth Street, and hastened to the safer shadows of Lexington Avenue. Seated on a bench in Stuyvesant Square in the pouring rain, Hildegarde insisted that the burglar had “made a full confession,” and promised to lead an honest life. To further this end she required him to meet her once each month, at twelve o’clock at night, usually in Washington Square.

As proof-reader in the multigraph department of the International Y. M. C. A. my wage was twelve dollars a week, and I found it the most uninteresting of all the positions held during my four years in the underbrush. This was doubtless because it was something I had done before. Not only had I read proof, but I had worked in a crowded dark basement under electric lights, and for long hours. Reading the annual reports of the Y. M. C. A. secretaries from about every country of the world was something of a novelty, though many of them were far from interesting.

What I did enjoy was the atmosphere, the spirit of the place—everybody spoke to everybody, and always with smiling courtesy. It was charming. Also it was comfortable to know that however ignorant you might be you would not be snubbed nor sneered at. The war had increased the work so much that the building on East Twenty-eighth Street swarmed with workers. Practically every day a new department was organized, only to be moved out the next day for the sake of getting larger quarters, and to make room for yet another new branch of work.

For a good many years I had heard the two “Ys” sneered at for being “sectarian.” While at the Jane Leonard, Miss Stafford had retorted to my praise of the Y. W.: “Being a Catholic you know what I think of the Young Woman’s Christian Association.” She then assured me that both the Y. W. and the Y. M. were so “dead against Catholics” that they even refused to list them in their employment departments.

In the multigraph department at the International Headquarters of the Y. M. I worked shoulder to shoulder with a young Catholic woman. Though she was not particularly efficient, she had held the position for several years; indeed, ever since she left school. Her younger sister was the private secretary of the head of one of the departments. Both these Catholic women had gotten their positions through the employment department of the Y. W.

In the lunch-room of the International Headquarters I met several other Catholic women, all earning their daily bread working for the Y. M. I neither saw nor heard of their being discriminated against. One of them boasted to me:

“Being a Catholic I’m not expected to go to prayers. That gives me an extra half-hour to do with as I please. I usually run out and do a little shopping or looking around, the stores are so convenient.”

Now, I hold no brief for any Church—I believe in Justice. In all my dealings with the two “Ys” I never saw the slightest indication that any creed was discriminated against.

Is it because the two “Ys” stand for progress that Catholics abuse them, belittle their work?

It may have been because of my long hours in the basement of the International Headquarters, or it may have been subsisting on such scanty meals—in any event soon after giving up my position in the multigraph department I was taken with a heavy cold. I know I had fever, for twice a day my pillows and sheets were saturated with perspiration. My head felt as big as a bushel measure, and was chockful of ache.

Struggle as hard as I might, and I did struggle, I couldn’t get up sufficient strength to get down-stairs, even though after hours of struggle I succeeded in putting on my clothes. The first Sunday of this illness I think I must have been in a measure delirious, for I was obsessed by the idea that no hospital would take me in, that I must wait until Monday.

With that idea planted firmly in my mind, I pinned a note on the pin-cushion—the name of the physician I wished called on Monday, and to which hospital I was to be taken. A ten-cent bottle of vaseline being all I possessed in the way of medicine, I put it beside my pillow and between dozes ate it.

Sunday night I began to cough up the phlegm that had made my chest feel so painfully tight. Then I fell asleep, such a good, sound sleep. When I wakened it was Monday forenoon, my head had become normal in size, and all the ache had disappeared. How weak I was! Trying to walk from the bed to the window I almost fainted.

If it had not been for Jack Harland, who also had a room on the top floor, I really don’t know what would have become of me. Miss O’Brien never came near me, neither did Hildegarde Hook. Jack, my tall, long-legged boy, as I used to call him, came twice a day, morning and evening, to ask how I felt and learn what he could get for me in the way of food.

Later, when I was able partially to dress and keep my eyes open, he would come in evenings and read to me—the daily paper and parts of “Les MisÉrables” and of “Ninety-Three.” Wonderful Victor Hugo! When read by a sympathetic boy’s voice these books become wonderful indeed.

The first time I was able to creep out, on returning, mounting the four flights of stairs to my room, I realized that something was the matter with my heart. Instead of hunting a job next day, as I had planned, I knew that I must wait until I got stronger. Working with a fluttery heart like that I might drop in my tracks at any moment.

I had paid a week’s rent and still had five dollars in my pocketbook, so why worry? Of course I would be fit before the end of the week. When that time came not only was my heart as fluttery as ever, but I realized that I had gained precious little, if any, strength.

A problem faced me—must I give up my plan of living on my wages, go to the bank and get money to tide me over, or what? What would Polly Preston, who had no money in bank, do under the circumstances? How was I to feel as a working woman felt if I kept in the back of my mind the knowledge that I could go to the bank and get money to tide me over a rough place? Again what would Polly Preston do?

On leaving a bench in Washington Square I returned to the rooming-house, and crawling up the stairs, I reached my room and took stock of my scanty wardrobe. It must be either my furs or my cloak. Fortunately, the weather was mild. I had exactly one dollar in my pocketbook, and to-morrow was rent day.

The following day I set out soon after breakfast, wearing both my cloak and furs over my coat suit. Recalling that I had seen one or more pawn-shops on Sixth Avenue in the vicinity of West Fourteenth Street, I went there. In the first I was told brusquely that they did not accept wearing apparel of any sort.

On leaving the second pawn-shop I held twenty dollars in my hand and was without my furs. Twenty dollars was ample provision for three weeks. Long before that time I would be able to get a good job now that work was so plentiful and so well paid.

Spending the rest of the day on a bench in Washington Square with a library book in my hand convinced me that I must find some other way of occupying my time if I was to gain strength. The afternoon paper solved that problem.

The U. S. Employment Bureau on East Twenty-second Street was in need of volunteer workers. On calling the next morning shortly after nine I found the street in front of the Bureau crowded by men. When finally, having wormed my way in and up the stairs, I made myself known and offered my services I was quickly placed—given a chair at a long make-shift table, planks on top of saw-horses, and told to register applicants willing to take work in shipyards.

That was a motley crowd—men holding jobs paying as high as five hundred dollars a month offered themselves for positions paying one-fifth that amount, and men who had no work at all refused jobs, the only ones they were fitted for, at three dollars a day.

One dear old Frenchman I shall never forget. He had passed down the long line of registrars struggling to make himself understood when he reached me. Though he had lived in New York more than twenty years he could neither speak nor understand the American language.

He was a highly paid cabinetmaker. Up to the outbreak of the World War his family comprised himself, his wife, five sons, and little Hortense. When he reached me, a bright day when winter’s smile seems spring, his little circle had dwindled within two years to himself and little Hortense. His five sons were under the poppies somewhere in France, his wife had died of a broken heart.

He acknowledged his age, past sixty, but insisted he still had strength enough to work for America and France. He would take any job, at any wage. I gave him a card and sent him to an employer who had specially stipulated that he would take no man over forty.

Within an hour that employer telephoned and asked for me. Instead of the blowing-up that the registrar at my elbow prophesied, he wished to thank me. The Frenchman was a tip-top workman, he said. Then he added:

“It’s not often you find a person, man or woman, who knows when to break a rule. That’s what I called you up for—to thank you for breaking my rule. If you find any more men like your Frenchman, don’t ask his age, just send him along.”

Learning that women were needed in the gas-mask factory at Long Island City, I got a card of introduction from the head of the woman’s branch of the employment bureau, and journeyed out. This woman had told me that the wage was exceptional—twenty-five to forty a week.

As fifteen dollars a week had, up to that time, been the highest I had received, and that for only a few weeks, I looked forward to making my fortune in the gas-mask factory in a few days. Another case of exaggerated wage. Fifteen dollars is what I was paid, and I would have had to work there a good long time before getting a raise.

As it happened I worked there two days, received my training and was made an inspector at fifteen dollars a week, then decided to find another job. The fumes of gasolene gave me a hideous headache, and besides I had seen large crowds of women turned away from the doors every day.

Returning to the employment offices of the Y. W., I stipulated that my next job must be work for the government, preferably in a munition plant. There were plenty of openings, and taking cards of introduction to several plants near New York City, I set out.

“Even if you don’t find anything to suit you,” the woman at the employment desk told me, “it will be helping us, letting us know what you think of the places.”

“Send only mature women to that plant in Hoboken. They want night-workers,” I advised her on my return. “Those other two places over in Jersey? If you have girls who have twenty dollars to spend before their wages begin to come in, send them there.”

“But the clubwomen?” she questioned. “We were told that the clubwomen had thrown open their homes, would board women workers in those plants.”

I showed her my figures, the lowest that I had been able to get, though directed by the employment office of the munition plant: three dollars a week for a small room, up two flights, seven dollars a week for two meals a day and three on Sundays, sixty cents car-fare,—that is if you caught a particular train making the trip for the purpose of taking munition workers.

“The wage being eleven dollars a week, girls working there who room with and are fed by those clubwomen, will have just forty cents with which to get lunch, laundry, and any other little luxury,” I went on. “And don’t forget she doesn’t get a dollar until the end of her second week. Her first week’s pay is held until she leaves—God knows for why—and she is not paid for her second week until she finishes it. In the meantime she has to pay for everything in advance, board, lodging, and car-fare.”

“Those clubwomen!” she exclaimed, in disgust. “The fuss they made about taking munition workers in their homes for the sake of helping the government.”

“That’s what being a worker means—everybody’s prey,” I replied, and the thought did not make me any the happier. “It’s gouge and squeeze, and when only a flicker of life remains fling them in an almshouse or a pauper’s grave. Ours is a Christian country.”

During the two months that followed I worked a few days in a cigarette factory, in a second cracker factory, folded circulars, addressed envelopes, stamped envelopes, and folded more circulars. It was on this last job that I was taken for a labor organizer.

Having nothing else to say to the woman working at my elbow, I asked if that printing-house was open or closed shop. Within three minutes she pattered off, and held a lengthy conversation with the forewoman. Within another three minutes this forewoman had informed me that as the work was “running short,” she would have no need of my services “right then.”

Those two words, “right then,” so I was informed, prevented that forewoman’s dismissal from being a discharge. Had she discharged me I could have collected the wage due me; as I was “laid off,” I had to wait until the next pay-day.

“There’s more ways of killing a dog besides choking it to death with butter,” the woman who explained the matter to me added. “Some of these days—if the workers’ day comes in my time—I’ll do some of the choking.”

On returning to my friend of the Y. W. employment department, she gave me a handful of cards.

“They’re all good positions, but I know which you’ll take,” she told me. “It’s the one with the smallest salary.”

“Why? I’m working for my living, living on my earnings,” I retorted, not a bit pleased by her declaration.

“Yes, but you’ve got an enormous amount of curiosity,” she laughed at me. “That position is with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It’s in the office, posting the books, and the salary is only fifteen a week. You’ll take it because you want to see how it works.”

I handed all the other cards back to her and set out for the offices of the A. S. P. C. A. There I was taken on and put to work at once—writing in a huge book the numbers for the current year of licensed dogs. It was not tenement work, but it touched the tenements and that pleased me.

During my second week, on learning that the society needed license inspectors to take the place of the men who had gone to the front, I determined to apply. When told by a man in the office that the positions were for men only, I did not change my mind. Up I marched to Mr. Horton’s office.

“Well,” said Mr. Horton, the manager, “we never have had a woman inspector. Still, I don’t know any reason why a woman shouldn’t hold the position. Do you know what the salary is?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. Horton smiled.

“Do you know what the duties are?”

“No, sir.”

Mr. Horton smiled again.

“Most of your work will be in the tenements, from house to house. Often from flat to flat. You’ll have to go wherever there is a dog—to see if it is licensed, healthy, and well cared for.”

It so happened that I did know all this. That was my reason for wanting the job—it would take me into the tenements, to meet tenement-dwellers face to face as fellow human beings. I would see the homes from which the men and girls, my fellow workers for so many months, come.

At last I was going into the tenements, stepping into a more dense section of the underbrush, where I would get at least glimpses of the heart of the jungle.