Yes, I was very unhappy. I kept at my work, doing it efficiently; but the place now appeared hideous and abhorrent to me, and every day I asked myself:
"How much longer can I bear it?"
I remember leaving my desk one day, going to the girls' dressing-room, and just sitting down alone and crying, without knowing just what I was crying about—I who cried so little!
I suppose things would have gone from bad to worse for me but for two things that happened to distract me.
We moved, Lolly and I. I can't say that our rooms were as attractive and clean-looking as the ones we had at the Y. W. C. A., and of course they cost more. Still, they were not bad. We had two small rooms. Originally one large room, a partition had made it into two. By putting a couch in the outer room, we made a sitting-room, and were allowed to have our company there. Whichever one was up the last with company was to sleep on the couch.
Lolly made the rooms very attractive by putting pretty covers over the couch and table, and college flags that some men gave her on the wall, with a lot of pictures and photographs. The place looked very cozy, especially at night, but somehow I missed the cleanly order of my room of the Y. W. C. A.
I wrote a letter to Mr. Hamilton and gave him our new address. I could not resist telling him that I had been very unhappy; that I realized he was right, and that I could never go very far when my equipment in life was so pitifully small. However, I added hopefully that I intended to read a lot that winter, and that Lolly and I were going to join the library. I could take a book with me to work. There were many intervals during the day when I could read if I wished to; in the luncheon hour, for instance, and on the cars going to and from work. One could always snatch a moment. Didn't he think I would improve myself much by reading?
He did not answer me, but a few days later three large boxes of books came to the house for me.
Lolly and I were overjoyed. We had a great time getting shelves for the books and setting them up. We had Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Gautier, Maupassant, Carlyle's "French Revolution," and the standard works of the English authors. Also we had the Encyclopædia Britannica. I was so happy about those books that my depression dropped from me in a moment. I felt that if my little arms could have embraced the world, I should have encircled it. It was not merely the delight of possessing books for the first time in my life, but because he had chosen and sent them to me.
The second thing that came up to divert me from a tendency to melancholia at this time happened at the yards immediately after that.