Before the month was over, Nance began to wonder if Mrs. Snawdor was right. With unabating zeal she tramped the streets, answering advertisements, applying at stores, visiting agencies. But despite the fact that she unblushingly recommended herself in the highest terms, nobody seemed to trust so young and inexperienced an applicant.
Meanwhile Birdie Smelts's thrilling prospect of joining her company at an early date threw other people's sordid possibilities into the shade. Every night she practised gymnastics and dance steps, and there being no room in the Smelts' flat, she got into the habit of coming up to Nance's room.
One of the conditions upon which Nance had been permitted to return to
Calvary Alley, was that she should not sleep in the same bed with Fidy
Yager, a condition which enraged Mrs. Snawdor more than all the rest.
"Annybody'd think Fidy's fits was ketchin'," she complained indignantly to Uncle Jed.
"That there front room of mine ain't doin' anybody no good," suggested
Uncle Jed. "We might let Nance have that."
So to Nance's great joy she was given a big room all to herself. The slat bed, the iron wash-stand, the broken-legged chair, and the wavy mirror were the only articles that Mrs. Snawdor was willing to part with, but Uncle Jed donated a battered stove, which despite its rust-eaten top and sagging door, still proclaimed itself a "Little Jewel".
No bride, adorning her first abode, ever arranged her possessions with more enthusiasm than did Nance. She scrubbed the rough floor, washed the windows, and polished the "Little Jewel" until it shone. The first money she could save out of her factory earnings had gone to settle that four-year-old debt to Mr. Lavinski for the white slippers; the next went for bedclothes and cheese-cloth window curtains. Her ambition was no longer for the chintz hangings and gold-framed fruit pieces of Mrs. Purdy's cottage, but looked instead toward the immaculate and austere bedroom of Miss Stanley, with its "Melodonna" over the bed and a box of blooming plants on the window-sill.
Such an ideal of classic simplicity was foredoomed to failure. Mrs. Snawdor, like nature, abhorred a vacuum. An additional room to her was a sluice in the dyke, and before long discarded pots and pans, disabled furniture, the children's dilapidated toys, and, finally, the children themselves were allowed to overflow into Nance's room. In vain Nance got up at daybreak to make things tidy before going to work. At night when she returned, the washing would be hung in her room to dry, or the twins would be playing circus in the middle of her cherished bed.
"It's lots harder when you know how things ought to be, than when you just go on living in the mess, and don't know the difference," she complained bitterly to Birdie.
"I've had my fill of it," said Birdie, "I kiss my hand to the alley for good this time. What do you reckon the fellers would think of me if they knew I hung out in a hole like this?"