But to get back to Fred. I wrote Mr. Hamilton that Fred was likely to be transferred to the New York office, and in that event he would take me with him. Of course it would be a fine opportunity for me, as all the best publishing houses and magazines were in New York, and I would have a chance to submit my work directly to the editors. Then, too, if Fred was placed in charge of the New York offices, it would be much pleasanter than in the stock-yards, since there would be merely a handful of clerks. He never answered that letter, either. I wondered why he never wrote to me. His silence made me blue and then reckless.
Lolly, who by this time knew all about Mr. Hamilton, offered me her usual consolation and advice. The consolation was a cigarette, but I didn't care for it at all. Cigarettes choked me every time I tried to smoke them, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why she liked them. She must have smoked a dozen packages a day, for she smoked constantly. Her pretty fingers were nicotine-stained, and I've known her even in the night to get up and smoke. So I could not accept Lolly's consolatory cigarette. I did, however, follow her advice in a way. She said:
"Nora, the only way to forget one man is to interest yourself in another—or many others."
So toward the end of the month I began to go about with some of Lolly's friends.
They took me to dinners, theaters, and some social and Bohemian clubs and dances. At one of these clubs I met Margaret Kingston, a woman lawyer, who became my lifelong friend. I don't know how old she was, but to me then she seemed very "grown-up." I dare say she was no more than forty or forty-five, though her hair was gray. She was a big woman physically, mentally, and of heart. Good-humored, full of sentiment, and with a fine, clear brain, I could not but be attracted to her at once. She was talented, too. She wrote, she painted, she was a fine musician, and a good orator. She was a socialist, and when very much excited, declared she was also an anarchist. With all her talents, possibly because of a certain impractical and sort of vagabond streak in her, she was always poor, hard up, and scraping about to make both ends meet.
She came over to the table where I was sitting with Lolly and Hermann and a newspaper man, and she said she wanted to know the "little girl with the black eyes." That was I. We liked each other at once, just as Lolly and I had liked each other. I form attachments that way, quickly and instinctively, and I told her much about myself, my writing, etc., so that she became at once interested in me and invited me to her house. She said she "kept house" with another "old girl."
I went to see them that very next night. They had a pretty house on G—— Avenue. Mrs. Kingston took me through the place. I suppose I looked so longingly at those lovely rooms that she asked me if I wouldn't like to come and live with them. She said she needed a couple of "roomers" to help with the expenses, and offered me a dear little room—so dainty and cozy!—for only seven dollars a week, with board. There were to be no other boarders, so she said; but there was a suite of two rooms and a bath in front, and these she intended to rent without board. She laughingly said that as these rooms were so specially fine, she'd "soak the affluent person who took them" enough to carry our expenses. I wanted badly to move in at once, but I was afraid Lolly would be offended, so I said I'd see about it.
On that very first visit to Mrs. Kingston, who asked me, by the way, to call her "Margaret"—she said she felt younger when people called her that; and if it didn't sound so ugly, she would even like to be called "Mag"—I met Dick Lawrence, a Tribune reporter.
One never knows why one person falls in love with another. See how I loved Hamilton despite his frankly telling me he was only "interested" in me. Dick Lawrence fell in love with me, and just as Hermann was Lolly's shadow, so Dick became mine. He was as ambitious as I, and quite as impractical and visionary. He wrote astonishingly clever things, but never stuck at anything long enough to succeed finally. He was a born wanderer, just like my father, and although still in his early twenties, had been well over the world. At this time the woes of Cuba occupied the attention of the American press, and Lawrence was trying to get out there to investigate conditions. This was just prior to the war.