“That did not turn out so badly,” she assured herself. “Perhaps everything will come along quite as well.” And yet, as she took a handful of silver coins and one paper dollar from her purse and added them up, her face was very sober. She was a long way from home, and there could be no retreat.
The place she was to call home was above the store. Too tired and preoccupied to notice at first, she received a shock when she at last became conscious of her surroundings. The room in which she sat was a tiny parlor, all her own. Off from that was a bedroom. Everything—furniture, rugs, decorations,—was in exquisite taste and perfect harmony.
“Contrast!” she exclaimed. “Who could ask for greater contrast? Rags below, and this above!” She stared in speechless surprise.
One thing astonished her. Opposite the window in the parlor was an oval, concave mirror, like an old-fashioned light reflector. It was some two feet across.
“I wonder why it is here,” she murmured. She was to wonder more as the days passed.
When she had prepared herself for the night’s rest, she snapped out the light, then stood for a brief time at the open window looking out into the night. She was on the second floor of her uncle’s small building. Before her were the low, flat roofs of some one-story shacks. Looking far beyond these, she saw squares of light against the night sky. These she knew were lighted windows of distant skyscrapers. There were thousands of these windows.
“What can they all do at night?” she asked herself. “Struggling to make money, to get on, to keep their families housed and fed,” the answer came to her. Then, strangely enough, her mind carried her back over the trail that had brought her to this city. It had been an interesting adventure, that long bus ride. Six of the passengers, including herself, had ridden hundreds of miles together. They had become like a little community.
“It was as if these were pioneer days,” she told herself now. “As if we were journeying in covered wagons in a strange new land.” One of these long distance passengers, as you will know, had been a young man. In his golf knickers and soft, gray cap, he had seemed a college boy. But he was not. “Out of college and at work,” was the way he had expressed it.
“What work do you do?” she had asked.
He had hesitated before replying. Then his answer had been vague. “Oh, I just look after people.”