On the following Monday Anne found a position with a fruit commission house on Front Street. The salary was not quite what she had hoped, but the surroundings were so different from the office of Lowell & Morrison that she was glad to take it.
Here there were no soft rugs, no quietly closing doors, or smoothly running elevators; no suave and courtly men. Great drays rumbled through the street outside; loud-voiced men called orders in strange, foreign tongues. For the first hours of the morning the warehouse shook with the thud of huge crates being thrown from trucks, trundled through the cool darkness of the shed and piled high to the shadow of the roof. In the afternoon the rumble of the drays loading and unloading ceased; many of the men went home; the place was quiet. Anne could hear the whistle of the boats at the wharves, and on foggy days the wail of the fog sirens very near.
On Saturday afternoon the office closed at one o'clock and Anne spent until six looking for an apartment. At dusk she found what she thought would do. It was the upper floor of an old house on the edge of Russian Hill. The house was run down and rather dismal, but the rear windows looked out on a small garden, and from Anne's floor, a little triangle of the Bay was visible.
The landlady was a childless widow, a thin, saddened woman with soft brown eyes that had almost lost the trick of brightening. But when she heard about Rogie they lit gently and she suggested a sand-pile in one corner of the garden and a crib for his morning and afternoon nap in her own bedroom. Anne's first feeling, that there it would be almost impossible to forget the past, lessened, and she closed the arrangement, grateful for the garden, the glimpse of the Bay, and Mrs. Jeffries' pleasure in Rogie.
On Sunday there was a family dinner at the flat and afterwards Anne and Rogie and Belle came to the new home. Mrs. Jeffries had put some flowers on the ugly center table and covered the gas globe with orange crêpe paper.
"Oh," Anne gasped when she saw it, "I wish she hadn't done that."
"Never mind. Let it stay up for a day or two and then it can catch fire or destroy itself somehow," Belle advised.
Anne shook her head. "It doesn't matter really—and she might be hurt."
"Now, Anne, don't start in that way. You know it won't work. If this furnishing is her taste and she begins to 'take an interest' in you and tries 'to make you comfortable' you'll only blow up in the end. Take those orange shades down and tell her in the morning that you don't want anything added to your rooms. You needn't be sharp about it, but you can be firm."
Anne smiled with a wistfulness that escaped Belle, touring the room in inspection of the ugly steel engravings hung exactly in the center of each wall. The first hour in her new home, and already she knew that there would be many nights when she would be grateful for even the terrible green glass vase that held the flowers, if it meant any one's caring for her comfort.