Hertha, when she slipped from Miss Witherspoon's charge, experienced no difficulty in finding a suitable dwelling place in New York. She had not studied for years in a school conducted by northern teachers without learning of the philanthropies that were showered upon people in the North. The Young Women's Christian Association was for just such girls as she, and therefore, under the direction of a friendly policeman, she soon reached headquarters and was given temporary shelter. As she walked about in the comfortable rooms, luxurious in her eyes, she felt that she had indeed entered the white world, her lawful heritage; and if it was hard to lose all family ties—mother, sister, brother, swept away as though in some swift disaster of nature—on the other hand, life of a sudden had become strangely simplified. How easy it was to move through the world if you were white! She had always been conspicuous, a mark for astonished comment when with her black brother and sister, for whispered commiseration when working out in service. Now no one could comment at all. She was like every one else. She need not shrink if she were rudely treated, she might answer back; no longer must she "keep her place," hers was the place of the dominant race. When she remembered her lover, her cheeks flamed. No need to fear that she, a white girl, would ever again think to give herself without exacting a full return.

But what should she do? She was young and white and had something less than two thousand dollars to her credit at the bank; moreover, she had stored in her mind a multiplicity of suggestions to be turned over and reviewed as she made her way through the streets or lay in her bed at night. Had she gone to Boston with Miss Witherspoon, she would at once have used a fair share of her fortune on her education; but, perhaps because she had cut loose from old plans, she rejected the taking up of dressmaking. She inclined to stenography and typewriting; but Ellen, who knew her better than any one else, had looked surprised on learning that she considered this means of earning a livelihood. She knew she was no scholar, and a chosen career that involved the swift jotting down of the ideas of others, later to be transcribed in black type on a white sheet from which a misspelled word shone with hideous clearness, might end in disgrace. So stenography was set aside.

Equally she was sure she would not take the advice of Miss Patty. To be a companion was the highest position that could have been reached by Hertha, colored; but it was menial service to Hertha, white. She had renounced a sheltered home; now that she was in the North she meant to live a new life of freedom.

After three days of happy wandering about the city and of careful consideration of her personal problem, she made a practical decision. Her legacy was small, and for the present she knew too little of the life about her or of her own ability to risk spending it upon an education. The operating work of which Miss Witherspoon had once spoken lay along the line of her natural aptitude. Why, then, not try it? If you were a good workwoman, it paid well. She was in a mood for the unusual, and therefore, under the guidance of the efficient and business-like Association secretary, she found herself, a week after her arrival in New York, doing her part in manufacturing muslin shirtwaists.

Kathleen she had discovered herself. She could not remain long at the Association, since the rooms for permanent guests were occupied; and with a list provided her by the secretary, she went out one afternoon to secure a suitable boarding place. The first and only house she entered was in charge of a thin, meager woman, the type of Miss Witherspoon, but with a more domineering manner and a flatter bust. The room for rent had a red carpet which smelt moldy, and brilliantly painted blue walls. Hertha hated it at once, but with difficulty succeeded in leaving without renting it, so persistent was the person in charge. Indeed, she only escaped with the proviso that she might look in again.

Once in the street, her confidence returned and she resolved to have nothing to do with this or any other cheap boarding place. In so immense a city it must be possible to find an attractive home.

She looked no further that day, and in the evening, standing in the office, she saw a large, fine looking Irish woman come up to the desk. Laughing and talking to a friend, her cheeks pink with her exertions from the gymnasium, her gray eyes glowing, Kathleen seemed the exact opposite of the disturbing landlady of the afternoon. "I know I'm bothering you, Miss Jones," she began, addressing the secretary, who was insignificant beside her, "but it's what you like. You couldn't be happy if you didn't have a dozen girls wanting you at once. What I'm after is some one to share my flat with me this winter. The boss has sent my brother to Chicago, where they need his work more than they do here. Hard luck for me, for he was bringing in a good wage! And now I've a little flat and only myself in it. Is there any girl here, do you think, would like a bedroom and the use of a kitchen and parlor? I'd let her have it for fifteen dollars a month."

Hertha was standing at the end of the desk, quite by Miss Jones's elbow. She expected that the secretary would introduce them, but instead Miss Jones looked down, moved some papers, and handed an elaborately ruled card for Kathleen to fill.

The Irishwoman took it up clumsily. "You fill it in," she said. "It's Kathleen O'Connor, 204 East 8th Street, fourth floor. I'll be home to-morrow night to any one who comes."

When she had gone Hertha asked for the address, explaining that she would like to see the room.

"Would you?" Miss Jones questioned, looking her over as though to place her again. "I thought of you, but did not know whether it was what you desired. It's rather a poor neighborhood, and yet it costs as much as a better one. Kathleen is Irish, you know. She only comes to the gymnasium, and she's irregular at that. She's a sort of nurse; not trained, of course, but good of her kind. Take the address; it's near your, work, and if you like——" and her voice trailed off as she turned to the next girl who came to her for guidance.

Hertha did "like." She went to Kathleen's the following evening and settled the bargain with a week's rent in advance. She liked the rear alcove room with its iron bed and fresh cover; and, though it was dark, it opened with wide doors into the parlor. "For the both of us," Kathleen explained, "unless you're wanting to go straight to bed and then it's yours." The parlor had little furniture—a plain table, two straight chairs, a comfortable rocker and a couch with a Bagdad cover. Kathleen had a small bedroom opening into a court; but the attractive spot was the kitchen. It faced the south and its two windows were filled with red geraniums in full bloom. The walls were light buff, the kitchen table was covered with a white oilcloth, and the wooden chairs were painted like the wall. For convenience, it was beyond anything Hertha had ever known with its gas stove, its hot and cold water for sink and tubs. She remembered the thousands of pails of water that her mother and Ellen had carried during the years she had been with them, and the millions of pieces of wood that Tom had piled up and brought into the kitchen. Getting meals and washing your clothes here would be fun, not work.

"I can make corn bread for breakfast," she said to Kathleen confidentially, as they looked into the closet with its wealth of pots and pans, spoons and egg beaters, skillets and toasters—more kitchen utensils than Hertha had imagined any one could own.

Kathleen regarded her quizzically.

"When do you go to work?" she queried.

"At eight o'clock."

"That's better than it used to be, but if you make corn bread it's likely it will only be for a week. Then you'll be so tired when you wake that the best tasting food in the world won't equal an extra nap, cuddled under the clothes, with the sure knowledge that it's wrong. It will be oatmeal cooked the night before and warmed up, and coffee made the way that's quickest, and a slice of toast, maybe, from the bread bought of the baker. You can boil yourself an egg, but they put the price on eggs up every winter to pay for the chemicals they use to keep them young."

"How about Sunday morning?" Hertha queried.

"Sundays you won't be getting up until it's time for dinner."

And while Kathleen's prophecy was in part true, while the increasingly cold weather and the hard hours made the morning nap imperative, Hertha did more for their little home than her companion had expected. She made curtains for the windows; she bought occasional attractive magazines; she framed a striking picture taken from the Sunday supplement. It was a landscape by Inness of great trees with heavy foliage, the clouds massed as though about to break in storm. Before a month was over the tenement rooms took on a deeper look of home.

The life within the rooms was very quiet. Kathleen's work made her hours most irregular. As an "experienced nurse" she was rarely on a case for more than two or three days and nights, so poor were the people among whom she worked. She had no diploma and was not recognized by the profession. During one year of her hard life she had acted as nurse in a woman's prison, but the time had never come when she could afford to go into a hospital. "And now it's too late; I'm too old," she would explain, "and besides I haven't got the education. Schooling don't go with starting in at the mill with your dresses at your knees, and your hands so little you can hardly manage the machine." Her hands were still small and well formed, and she had a pleasant touch. She was skillful at massage, and in the winter season had a few society women whose surplus flesh she vigorously rubbed off and whose faces she smoothed into comparative youth. Leaving the sumptuous house of some wealthy woman, she would hurry to a dark room in a tenement, where the cold and poverty made her eyes flame with anger, to spend the night by an ailing child, ministering with patience and even merriment to its many wants. And as her life carried her from one extreme to another, so she herself varied in mood, from the smiling, youthful looking woman whom Hertha had seen and loved from the first to an intense, angry iconoclast who found life for the many both cruel and unjust. She never ministered and brought to health the one ailing without remembering the ten others who were needlessly suffering and whom she could not aid. "I know that my work is nothing but putting courtplaster on a cancer," she would say to Hertha savagely as she came back from a home where she had coaxed the growing boy back to life, to see him in his convalescence go out to a ten-hour day of racking work. "I ain't fooled, though. I done what I could, but why won't his father fight for better hours and living conditions? He sits there and lets the boss use his boy worse than he'd use a machine. He's got the backbone of a chocolate eclair, that man." And then she would take up a copy of the daily "Worker" and become absorbed in the vision of the successful class struggle and a world set free.

"What shall we have for dinner to-night?" she had smilingly asked Hertha. "Shall we celebrate together with an Irish stew and ice cream and then go to the movies?"

"But this is your evening for the Y. W. C. A.," Hertha answered.

The smile left Kathleen's face. "I'm through there," she said. "It's not for me."

Hertha wanted to know more, but she was reticent with questions. As it happens, however, the silent person learns more of another's life than one who shows a voluble sympathy, and Kathleen was soon telling her friend that all girls' clubs and Christian Associations were nothing but charities; that she could have nothing to do with a charity herself, and that, had it not been for a moment's temptation, offered by a friend, she would never have entered the class. It was the exercise that she needed and the marching to music had been the best part. "And it's grand," she explained, "if only for an hour a week to be living as the Lord intended you with your legs apart." But this morning she had been giving massage to a rich uptown customer. "And after I had pommeled off the two pounds she'd gained at a twelve-course dinner the night before, she begins to tell me of her charities. 'I like best to help the working girl,' she says, 'and I gave my mite to their new building, but I'm troubled at the obstinacy of the young women in refusing to become servants. They have a false pride in the matter.' I kept my mouth shut, for I couldn't afford to lose a good customer, but I was that mad to think I might have been taking money off her as a gift that I stopped in at the office and told Miss Jones I should quit. 'Is that so, Kathleen?' she says quietly. 'It is for you to decide.' And then she asks: 'And how is Miss Ogilvie?' She always calls me Kathleen. Not that I mind it, but I'm fifteen years older than you, and Miss Jones needn't 'Miss Ogilvie' you to me. I don't wonder she does, though, for you wear your clothes as though you had always lived in a palace, and you speak like a princess."

"Don't be foolish," Hertha said, and then laughed—an odd, short laugh in which Kathleen joined, though as it happened she did not understand the joke. "Let's have the stew, only don't put quite so much onion in it, and we'll get the ice cream on the way home."

The stew was delicious and Hertha enjoyed it, while Kathleen consoled herself for the loss of the extra onion by a plentiful use of condiments. "I've just a good plain appetite," she explained. Then they went out into the noisy street to the theater where they sat in the orchestra and Hertha felt like a queen. In the South she had been only a few times to some cheap playhouse where she had been repelled by the vulgarity of the people and the performance; but here in New York the comfortable theater, darkened now, the music, the quiet audience, filled her with happy anticipation. She squeezed Kathleen's hand as the picture of a lovely young girl in gingham dress and pink sunbonnet flashed upon the screen, and the story began.

It was one of the fifty-seven varieties of moving pictures, all of which, Kathleen knew, were canned in the same syrup, but which to Hertha were freshly sweet. A beautiful girl, a pink sunbonnet, a young lover, blossoming apple trees. A coal mine discovered under the apple boughs. A cruel father and separation. The girl in a gilded palace registering despair. The lover seeking fame and gold. A titled villain mocking the girl's pure love. The villain's machination, the lover tied to the railroad track, the train dashing to within two inches of its victim. The escape, a night in the woods, the friendly beasts. The disclosure. "I love you still." The villain's contrition. His death. The coal mine exhausted. Soft music, two lovers and one kiss. Blossoming apple trees and the pink sunbonnet again. Far in the distance the sound of wedding bells. Then sudden darkness, and The Best Flavored Chewing Gum thrown upon the screen.

Hertha's heart beat fast during the whole of the story and she felt wave after wave of pleasurable excitement. It was so sad and yet so beautiful. The only thing to temper her enjoyment was Kathleen, who would laugh in the wrong places. When the hero and heroine were in great danger, Kathleen showed no apprehension. She chuckled at the approaching train, and gave little grunts of amusement when the villain threatened the girl. The only thing she seemed to care for was the bear who gave the boy shelter in his cave for the night. "The dear!" exclaimed Kathleen.

"But it's so improbable," Hertha whispered as the piano played Nevin's lullaby while the bear rocked the youth in his arms.

"Not half so improbable as the rest," Kathleen whispered back. "You can trust the brutes to do the right thing enough sight better than the men."

As the light went up Kathleen yawned.

"Haven't we got our money's worth of romance, infant?" she asked. "There's a meeting on Peonage to-night at Cooper Union. Let's go there."