Her ring was answered by a woman that appeared, as far as Mary could observe in the faint light, to be about sixty years old. Her hair was gray and severely arranged; her dress was shabby, and she looked very tired. To Mary she did not seem to be at all the type that would conduct the sort of place which the wanderer just then needed.
"Can you rent me a room?" she nevertheless inquired.
"With privileges?" asked the woman.
It was a phrase new to its hearer, but she understood that it described the kind of room she wanted.
"Yes," she almost whispered.
But the woman did not lower her voice. Her descent, as Mary afterwards learned, had been by slow stages, and her complaisance had been enforced through a history that began with the establishment of a respectable boarding-house, when a reform-election had driven her husband from the police-force, passed through a widowhood imposed upon by absconding lodgers and raised house-rents, and ended by the admission of first one and then many patrons that were, though they wanted what she had not always cared to give, at least certain to pay what she had to turn over to the church-corporation that owned the property.
"I got a nice second-floor front, just a step from the bath-room, at eighteen dollars," she said.
"A month?" inquired Mary.
The woman regarded her as if she were somewhat of a curiosity.
"Certainly not: eighteen a week."