“Ministers are like everybody else,” the Protestant girl announced. “They’ve got to feather their own nests.”
“What would your minister say to that?” I asked her.
“My minister!” she scoffed. “He don’t know me from Adam’s cat. He never speaks to nobody off Fifth Avenue.”
For years I had heard persons, men and women, declaim against the incomprehensible devotion of “shop-girls” to chocolate éclairs and gum-drops. Indeed only a few days before quitting the National Arts Club I overheard a high-priced music teacher declare that she lost all patience with “shop-girls” when she saw them lunching on a chocolate éclair instead of a bowl of oatmeal and milk, or of “good, nourishing soup.” My five weeks behind the counter furnished me with a proved solution to the problem.
The first time I tried lunching on a bowl of oatmeal and milk I began to experience a most uncomfortable sensation under my apron before three o’clock. By five that sensation had become a sharp griping pain. The day following I tried soup. In the middle of the afternoon when Nora learned how I was suffering, she went scurrying around among the girls in various departments and returned with three gum-drops, which she made me eat.
After that when I had ten cents or less to spend for lunch I invested in a chocolate éclair and gum-drops. Without a doubt such a diet does produce pale faces and a predisposition to tuberculosis. Experience taught me that it staves off the griping agony produced by hunger and standing on one’s feet longer than any other food to be had in New York City for the same money. When a girl’s wage is seven dollars a week, or less, ten cents a day is all she can spend for lunch.
At that time mothers on the lower East Side were rioting as a protest against the high price of milk and potatoes On the grocery floor of one of the largest department stores, where all foodstuffs were usually to be had at rock-bottom prices, onions were priced to me at thirty-nine cents the pound, white potatoes at twenty-seven, and butter at ninety-three. Three small bananas were offered and bought at twenty cents—a Saturday-night bargain.
Of course Alice and I could afford none of these luxuries. Having discovered black-eyed peas at ten cents a pound, and that a pound was enough for four dinners, we vied with each other in proclaiming our fondness for black-eyed peas. Another discovery was our mutual relish of peanut butter. We consumed it morning, noon, and night. As a substitute for meat we never found its equal.
During this time, on several occasions, I had been aroused by a repetition of that piercing shriek. Because no one else heard it I allowed Mrs. Wilkins and Alice to half-persuade me that it was a cat. Three times I got out of bed, and looking out my window tried to discover in the brilliantly lighted back yards the cat which could so exactly imitate a human being in agony.
About ten days before Christmas the entire population of our top floor, along with a good many roomers in other parts of the house, was aroused. The shrieks and groans came from the room of the young milliner. After pounding in vain on the milliner’s door the organist ran downstairs and returned followed by the landlady with her bunch of pass-keys. After they entered the room we saw the restaurant-keeper hurry out. Later he returned with a bottle of whiskey. While all this took place Alice, the newspaperman, and I had been kept in our rooms under the stern guardianship of the policeman’s widow.