When she got home she found a letter awaiting her. It bore a special-delivery stamp and the envelope was in Stillman's handwriting. She felt suddenly weak and she sat down.... She sat staring at the envelope a long time before she gathered courage to open it. When she did, a thin blue slip of paper fluttered out. It was a check for twenty dollars, payment for the last week she had spent in Stillman's service. There was no other word from him, just this brief symbol of what his decision was in regard to her.
She rose to her feet. She did not move, she stood staring ahead....
Presently she heard her mother call. She started guiltily.
"What am I wasting time here for?" she asked herself, with a strange fierceness. She saw Stillman's blue check lying on the table. She caught it up and tore it into bits.
Her mother's voice sounded again, this time querulously.
Claire Robson pushed her sagging hair from her forehead and went into her mother's room.
CHAPTER II
Mrs. Finnegan moved on the first of April. Claire, having by this time decided that she was more or less committed to her new life, got track of a Miss Proll, a middle-aged seamstress, who went out by the day, to come and occupy the little hall bedroom, so that Mrs. Robson was no longer alone in the house nights.
Claire had been ten days at the Café Ithaca and the experiment was losing its strangeness. There had been very little piano-playing to do. The new rooms at the rear of the saloon were an experiment that the regular patrons of the café had not yet accepted enthusiastically, and the looked-for patronage from the bastard American bohemianism was still a matter of hope and conjecture. The regular diners clung rather shyly to their old quarters opposite the bar, and Claire had to be content with making a long-range estimate of them. But she grew more and more friendly with Jimmy, and even Lycurgus got beyond the point of clasping his right hand over his heart every time he approached her.