“Had she given up her teacher’s position in the school for defective children?” I wondered, on my way to look her up. “And why was she stopping in such an out-of-the-way corner of the lower West Side?”
Though I loitered over the three miles and more of streets it was not quite seven o’clock when I rang the bell at the home for working girls which I found at the number given in Alice’s note. The stare of indignant protest hurled at me by the woman who opened the door!
“No,” she snapped, without giving me time to speak, “we haven’t got a vacancy. Everything’s filled up.” And she would have banged the door shut had I not put my foot in the opening.
“I’m calling on a guest,” I hastened to say, and taking out Alice’s note I offered it as proof.
“Oh! I mistook you for one of them laundry-workers,” she told me apologetically. “They’re always ringing me up this time mornings, though it do seem like they’d a-found out by now we ain’t goin’ to take ’em in however often they come.”
“Then you have vacancies?” I asked in surprise as she led the way to the reception-room of the home.
“Sure! Plenty of them for the kind of girls we want. What price was you expectin’ to pay?”
She accepted, with a gracious smile, my promise to call on her in case I decided to come there to live. While waiting for Alice my eyes wandered speculatively about the bleak little room, and I wondered how much she was paying.
“Four dollars a week for my room and two meals a day,” she told me, replying to one of my first questions. “That is one reason I wrote instead of waiting to call on you. I thought you might know of a better place?”
“You don’t suppose you could find a place for less money?” Her discontent nettled me, for I had more than half made up my mind to come there to live.