“This is so vast, what can it matter who one is? The Moira of yesterday is just as small compared to it, as this one here. Why should I care?”
She laughed at this bit of philosophy. It was not particularly comforting, but it helped her to believe that she had given up the past.... In her dreams the visions of the day mingled kaleidoscopically.
Moira knew nothing about New York in a practical way. Her path had always been the narrow round tripped by the fashionable visitor. Therefore, as she sat at breakfast with the “classified” columns of the Times before her she had no idea where she wanted to live. It happened that the first addresses that she jotted down in her notebook were far downtown and to these she went looking for the cheapest single room she could find.
The sights that met her eye filled her with half-humorous, half-tragic emotions. The landladies who greeted her were in the main revolting; she was taken into rooms that smelled, rooms that had cheap iron beds with battered brass knobs, that had carpets with holes in them and frayed lace curtains, grey with dirt, and hideous oak furnishings and coloured calendars on the walls. Three-fourths of them were not cleaned oftener than once a month, she was certain, and she determined to have cleanliness though every other comfort failed.
She found it at last. On the west side of the Village she was attracted by a neat card bearing the words “furnished rooms” on the door of a brick house that looked many degrees better kept than its neighbours. A shy grey-haired woman admitted her. There were several rooms, all spotless, and she selected one reasonably priced, with white painted woodwork and plain furniture that she thought she might manage to live with. When she asked for the telephone to send for her luggage from the hotel, she was shown into the daughter’s room. In one corner of this pure haven was a small, square stand covered with chintz and draped with flowered cretonne. Upon it stood a discarded perfume bottle filled with holy water, a prayer-book and catechism, and a tall white statuette of the Virgin and child, with the monogram M. A. on the rococo base. On the wall above the stand was a black crucifix with the Christ in gilt. Behind the Christ was thrust a little palm cross. Still higher than the crucifix hung a photo-engraving of the Madonna and child from some Italian master, in a gilded frame. The homely simplicity of the scene brought tears to the girl’s eyes....
But she felt a little less benevolent the next day when she asked Mrs. McCabe why there were no mirrors in the bathroom. That lady gazed at her with the sad severity of the timid and replied:
“I don’t know. There just ain’t, and there won’t be.”
In this atmosphere of staggering piety began the career of “Mary Smith.”
XVI
By the end of two years Moira had repaid the last of the five hundred with which she had possessed herself on leaving Thornhill; and accumulated a surplus of her own. From the day she quitted the Munson School of Stenography and Typewriting she had never experienced difficulty in securing a job and in making an excellent impression. The two changes which she had made were of her own volition. For more than six months now she had been secretary to the executive vice-president of a soap company and had become something of an executive herself, on a salary that still had a good margin in which to grow.