“It’s a shame!” she cried, shedding copious tears. “Men are always kinder to a woman than other women.”
“It’s because a woman better understands a woman. Knowing the strength as well as the weakness of her own sex, she recognizes their petty deceits and dishonesties,” I replied soothingly, while I resisted an inclination to give her a good deep jab with my hatpin, and thereby give her a cause for real tears. “Don’t forget, ‘it takes a thief to catch a thief.’ Good-by, Mrs. Brown.” And I ran down the stairs and out at the front door. So far as I am concerned that was the last of Mrs. Brown, the inventor of the theory of “vibrations.”
When engaging a room at the Jane Leonard the clerk told me that guests were not allowed to keep their trunks in their rooms, and I thereupon congratulated myself on my trunks being in storage. On moving in, for in that “home” for working women guests engage rooms sight unseen, I wondered that the management had taken the trouble to formulate a rule against trunks. There was literally no place for even the smallest trunk unless it was swung from the ceiling—the bed being too low for even the thinnest of steamers.
Besides a narrow cot the top of which was scarcely one foot above the floor, there was a small rocking-chair, a small table with one minute drawer, a narrow chiffonier with five shallow drawers, topped by a mirror narrow both ways. There was also a sash-curtain, a window-shade, a white cotton cover on the table and another on the chiffonier, a clothes-closet, and a face-towel so tiny I felt sure it would never grow up. Besides a brown door with a transom and a narrow window opening on a court only slightly wider than the door, my room consisted of four shiny yellow walls, a shiny white ceiling, and a shiny brown floor. After my first peer around my new quarters—because of the narrowness of the court and the height of the two buildings my window only admitted twilight—I took myself to task for being overcritical. Though I was paying two dollars and a quarter a week more than room and food had cost at Mrs. Brown’s, I would not have to do either cooking or dish-washing. Doubtless the meals would be better and more abundant than those I had prepared for myself.
Then there were the piazzas, one on each floor, and the roof-garden, all overlooking the river, I continued, enumerating all the advantages of my new abiding-place. It would be so lovely after a hard day down-town to sit and watch the river until bedtime. Of course I must get another job on Monday; no use of loafing when our country needed every woman as well as every man. By that time my friend, a librarian who had lived in the Jane Leonard for several years, would return from her vacation, and I would have a companionable person to speak to—for weeks before leaving the rooming-house Molly was my only speaking acquaintance.
Dinner that night did not come up to my expectations—my pet abominations, baked beans and a brown bread even worse than the concoction set before you three times a week in Boston. For in spite of my three years in a Massachusetts college, I never learned to enjoy its national dish, or two dishes. Before going to the Jane Leonard when this combination was put before me I had always looked the other way and waited for the next course. Here there was no next course. Baked beans and brown bread was dinner.
A woman who sat under my elbow—the table was so tiny that the four of us literally sat under each other’s elbows—this neighbor of mine who had an unpronounceable German name and looked like an American of African descent, warned me darkly that I would be glad to get such nourishing food before “this country” got out of the war. Nourishing! The very adjective that had been drummed into my ears while at college! Even three years’ drumming did not make me form the habit. Its worse result was a play.
I do not now recall just what it was about that composition that so aroused the ire of Professor Baker. It may have been that it proved my point—that New Englanders partake of their Wednesday and Saturday dinners and their Sunday breakfasts as a sort of memorial feast in honor of the hardships enjoyed by their ancestors when they first landed on their rock-bound coast. Mr. Baker would not agree that his ancestors enjoyed hardships. All one has to do is to read history. Early New Englanders enjoyed hardships just as the Irish do being persecuted—and almost as much. The result was pretty much the same—both peoples multiplied on the face of the earth and left their descendants a subject for conversation, a veritable snowball of a subject, which, by the simple method of rolling it over the tongue a hard fact becomes slushy fiction.
The next morning, Sunday, we had eggs for breakfast. Unfortunately I was the first at table, so did not have the advantage of advice from my table-mates. I ordered it medium-boiled. When peeled, it closely resembled a golf ball that had been lying in the wet grass for a couple of months. That proved to be an intensely hot day, but sitting on the roof-garden or the piazzas was impossible because of a virulent stench.
“It’s from the dumping-plant, where the city garbage is loaded on scows to take out to sea,” a woman who saw me hurry down from the roof-garden explained. “The wind always blows from that direction hot days.”