Copying several addresses from the bulletin board, we trudged out of the big building, with our satchels and lunch-boxes in our hands. A fine rain was falling; it seemed later in the day than it was. We were adrift in that great city. Deciding to look up none of the addresses till the morrow, we started for the Young Women’s Christian Association, of which we had heard before leaving home. Belle thought that when we got out to Washington Street she could get her bearings and easily find Warrenton Street, where the Association building was. But on reaching there, she could not be sure whether to go up or down; so we plodded on, not knowing whether we were going toward or away from our hoped-for destination. Everyone we accosted was kind, but no one knew where Warrenton Street was. Car after car would go by, but we did not know what one to take. The only policemen we could discover were on the cars. We laughed miserably as we thought of our parents’ injunctions to “ask a policeman.” The Boston policemen didn’t like walking in the rain.
On and on we trudged, our arms aching from the satchels, and, much of the way, harrowed by uncertainty. Finally someone told us we were nearing the street in which the Y. W. C. A. was located. How good it was to spy that sign, and how like a shelter the huge building was as it loomed before us! The street was narrow and dismal (it was even on a sunshiny day) and on that dark day looked especially unpromising, but our goal was reached; our strength and courage were well-nigh spent. Shelter, refuge—what meaning in those words, and how soon we had learned the need of them in this big, strange, rainy Boston!
The girl who answered the door-bell, a slow-moving, stolid creature, replying to our request to see the Superintendent, said that she was at dinner; that we would have to wait. It was then after two in the afternoon. Of course we would wait; we asked for nothing better. We volunteered that we had come to engage room and board.
“I’m sorry, but the house is full,” she said.
Belle dropped into a chair. She had gone through so much! Her vaunted courage was proving a broken reed. I stood there, desperate, not knowing which way to turn. On the way thither it had gradually dawned upon me that Belle’s courage was rapidly oozing. I had had to exchange satchels with her and carry her heavier one (though she was taller and larger than I), as she had declared she could carry it no farther. It was a novel position for me—to be the leader; but we tacitly changed places during that long rainy walk.
I looked at Belle, a forlorn heap in the chair. I saw that stolid girl, waiting for us to go, since she had told us there was no room—to go out in the rain, no shelter in view! I felt the humiliation of our position before the girl who was showing impatience for us to start, but summoned enough spunk to say, “Please tell the Superintendent we would like to see her when she is at liberty.”
Leaving us with the parting shot that “Every room in the house is taken,” she went away.
Bursting into tears, Belle declared she would go home on the morrow; she didn’t want to study medicine—had never wanted to—only did it to please her people—didn’t like Boston—hated Dr. Matson, and didn’t want to be a woman doctor any way; she would go back and teach school. Her outburst astonished me. Pitying her, and agreeing with her in part, her giving way put me on my mettle. So, having sense enough to know that we were both worn from the physical and emotional strain, and that, dark as things were, they seemed darker because of our exhaustion, I sat down and, opening our lunch-box, fairly forced the food into Belle’s mouth, and devoured some myself. The messenger girl passed the door several times, peering in curiously; she looked as though she were going to tell us we must not eat in the waiting room, but passed on. It must have been an unaccustomed sight to her. I myself felt the unfitness of it all, but did not care; we were nearly famished; it was the desperation of self-preservation.
As we ate and talked, Belle drooped less, and we soon got interested in the coming and going past the door. Happy, laughing girls passed and re-passed, running to catch the elevator, peeping in at us with half-veiled curiosity, and moving on. How envious we felt at seeing them greet one another—everybody knew everybody else in Boston, except these two miserable girls who knew only each other.
We kept looking at the clock; we tried to jest, wondering what that woman had for dinner that kept her so long. We must have sat there an hour, expectant, anxious. The messenger girl seemed to have disappeared for good. At last, desperate, I started out down the strange corridor, and there met her: