We were on the landing where the stairs turned into the ground-floor. She glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Pitbladder's door, into which a small blue-aproned figure at this moment was passing with a tray laden with Mrs. Pitbladder's breakfast. When it had closed again, she looked at me hesitatingly, as if fearful of taking me too far into her confidence. Then, perhaps reading a certain unconscious reassurance there, she replied with a brief—
"I wouldn't, if I was you. You can't stand it."
"But I'll have to stand it," I returned; "I'm as poor as anybody here."
She shook her head. "But you couldn't work on it—you're not used to it. I can see that. Besides, it isn't so cheap as you think it'll be. You'd better go out. I wouldn't even eat here to-day. I wouldn't begin it. There's a little lunch-room over on Third Avenue where you can get enough to eat, and just as cheap as here."
The woman's manner was so mysterious, and withal so very earnest, not to say urgent, that I felt instinctively that there was something more in all she said than the mere depreciation of the quality of the victuals she warned me against. So I was not surprised when she said slowly and insinuatingly, as though feeling every step of the way:
"You know the misunderstanding you had this morning—about the change?"
"Yes," I answered, more mystified than ever. Then, as she looked me full in the eyes, light dawned upon me, and I saw the old woman up-stairs in a character as startling as it was infamous.
"Well," Mrs. Lumley said, when she saw that I understood; and with that she again dropped into her habitual expression of bovine stolidness. We parted at the foot of the stairs, she to disappear into the back of the house, and I to join the waifs in the unfriendly sitting-room.
The afternoon I spent sitting in Union Square, whence I went at half-past five for a bite of supper in the dairy lunch-room where I had made my toilet in the morning. I had had no luncheon, feeling that I could not afford more than two meals a day now. I sat a long time over my cup of coffee and three hard rolls. I did not want to return to that dreary house until the lamps should be lighted and it was time to go to bed. The very thought of returning to sit with those forlorn waifs, in that cheerless whitewashed sitting-room, was appalling.