“Miss Porter, Miss Porter.” She was standing on the parlor floor as she shouted up the stairs to me on the top floor. “I want your room, an’ I want it at onct. An’ I want you should know I’m a lady—I’ll not be insulted in my own house.”
The insult referred to was a note left on the hat-rack at the front door that morning on my way to work. In it I objected to having a strange man sleep in my bed during the day, while I was at work.
In Greenwich Village, when the origin of tobacco-smoke is feminine, it is invariably accompanied by crums of face-powder and smudges of rouge. There were no such marks on my bureau. But the odor of tobacco-smoke in the sheets of the bed! The signs of soot and grease grimed hands on my towels! I was paying four dollars and a half for my room, small with a slanting roof and a half-window on the top floor. I had no intention of sharing it with an unknown man even for the sake of helping my grunting, groaning landlady.
In more ways than one Miss O’Brien was out of the ordinary. Her name, her religion, and her brogue to the contrary, she boasted of being English. As a consequence she was not descended from an Irish king nor did she have a saint in her family. She was red-hot for suffrage, because she wanted a law passed to force women working outside the home to make their own beds and clean their own rooms.
“’Tain’t right for women in business not to do their share of the housework,” she would tell me, while leaning on a stub of a broom or wiping my mirror with a dirty rag. “I don’t mind doin’ for men—it’s only right I should, they bein’ men an’ payin’ me.”
“The women pay you. I pay a half-dollar more than the man who vacated it without giving you notice. You told me so yourself.”
“I ain’t sayin’ you don’t pay all the room’s worth,” she assured me, and maybe by this time having smeared my mirror to her satisfaction she would be propped against the facing of my door. “What I says an’ what I stands by is that it ain’t right for you and Hildegarde Hook not to do your rooms regular—you bein’ women an’ not men. No, it ain’t right, Miss Porter. You hadn’t oughter treat no woman like that.”
When she found that I intended to take her at her word and give her her room, she became repentant and offered to let me “stay on.” Unfortunately for her good intentions the atmosphere of Greenwich Village had become boring. Even a woman’s hotel, the only vacancy to be found at that season, promised a welcome relief.
My stay in that Adamless purgatory was not very long. Before I had been there one week an old woman occupying the room to the left of me objected to my using my typewriter between seven and eight in the evening. Before the end of my second week an old woman at my right positively forbade me to touch it mornings before eleven, and before I had completed my third week an old woman in front of me entered a violent protest against my using it at all. God defend me from idle women!
In a fit of I’ll-take-anything-I-can-get I applied to the agent of the Phipps tenements. She had no vacancy, but on my second call, seeing that I was near desperation, she suggested that I go talk to a Mrs. Campbell who lived in another house owned by the same company. Mrs. Campbell was taking her sick daughter to Staten Island for the summer.