At a desk, commanding an excellent view of both exits from the dining room, a lady sat with the same somewhat morose expression of countenance which I was beginning to believe the universal New York badge. (Later I corrected this opinion. It is only the women doomed to constant dealing with their sisters in the mass who acquire it.) This particular woman had the presumably pleasant task of receiving the money of the diners. In return she gave them cards, without which egress would have been impossible, for other disillusioned persons guarded the doors, and only the surrender of the oily piece of pasteboard enabled one to escape. During the whole period of my incarceration—I was about to say—in the Margaret Louisa I used to linger about the dining room hoping that some day some reckless, abandoned soul would attempt to flee without the delivery of her card. But it never happened. Meekly, automatically, we all paid, received the token of payment, and slipped out into the wide halls.
The parlor was a most inviting room, mellow in tint, comfortable in the cut of the chairs and sofas, and inviting with magazines and pictures. I wandered into it after my first dinner in New York. I turned the pages of the magazines, I looked at the pictures on the walls, and I wondered with all my powers of bewilderment why every other woman who entered the apartment should immediately sit stiffly down, clasp her hands in her lap or against her stomach, and gaze at me reprovingly. As the number of these women grew, I became convicted in my mind of indecorous conduct, though I was only turning the pages of the North American Review. The rustle of the leaves sounded noisy, blatant even, in the ominous stillness. Suddenly I understood why.
A stout lady in widow’s weeds cleared her throat twice, warningly, and the after-dinner prayer meeting was upon us. The North American Review slid from my guilty fingers, and I almost lost my balance as I stooped to recover the magazine. Then I composed my features, folded my own hands and listened to the leader of the meeting. Once I raised my eyes, and through the door that led into the hall I saw Bob Mathews standing. He was staring into the parlor with an expression of arrested protest and strangled mirth upon his nice, homely face. At that precise moment the worthy leader was besieging the throne of grace with intercessions for “the one new come among us,” and I felt vulgarly prominent.
It did not last long, that prayer meeting, and when it was over there was a little gentle conversation. The leader had just advanced to me with a smile of professional kindness when Bob bore down upon me. She withdrew, disapproval squaring her shoulders. My unfortunate caller and I retired to the remotest corner of the room and conversed in guilty whispers, alternated with sudden trumpet blasts of sound as we realized that our subdued manner was unnecessary and open to suspicion. All the others sat around and looked at us. They were all quite sure, I think, that the list of boarding houses with which Bob furnished me on departing was a document of very sinister import.
The next morning, armed with this list and with one furnished by the uninterested lady at the office, I set out in search of a permanent abode. In Agonquitt I had seemed to myself a person of the furthest reaching prudence because I had left for New York a whole fortnight earlier than my engagement as Mr. Hennen’s stenographer required. The two weeks were to be devoted to “settling comfortably” and to “learning the city thoroughly.” By the end of the first forenoon I asked myself bitterly if a year—if a lifetime—would suffice for either of these results.
I had told six landladies that the hall bedroom I sought was for myself alone, and I had been banished at once, without further parley, from their presences. I was discouraged to learn that spinsterhood, which we in Agonquitt regard as a state normal, admirable and even a little high-minded, was frowned upon here. The number of front doors that closed upon me because I could lay claim to no husband!
I have never satisfactorily solved the problem of the average landlady’s dislike for the single woman. Is the married boarder less addicted to bathroom laundry work? Does she consume less gas in the front hall and the parlor? Is she not so apt to keep the wearied purveyor of her meals and lodgings from the folding bed which adorns the front drawing room with a pretense of being a curio cabinet during the day? Or is it merely that even in these strenuous days of wage-earning women, a husband seems to the mediæval-minded landlady a guarantee of payment securer than any number of salaried positions? I don’t know. I only know that my first forenoon’s search for a habitation was rendered uncommonly difficult because I could not assure six gimleteyed landladies in rusty black that I was “wooed an’ married an’ all.”
There were other ladies—a considerable number of them, too—who gave one look at my cloth turban, made by Miss Milly, our Agonquitt milliner; and at my reefer, which Miss Keziah, who goes out by the day, had helped mother to make; and smilingly shook their heads. These informed me, interposing their plump persons between me and their stairways, as though they feared a forcible entrance on my part, that they had nothing which would suit me—nothing under twenty dollars a week. At first this abashed me, for ten dollars was the utmost which I could allow for lodgings and meals; and I departed, gurgling apologetically in my throat. Later, anger began to stir my pulses, and I gave these haughty ones level glance of scorn for level glance of scorn, and said: “Ah, I am looking for a suite of two rooms and bath; breakfast upstairs, of course; you have nothing of that sort?” And we separated in mutual incredulity and respect.
During that day and the soul-racking, foot-blistering days that followed, I gained a fairly clear idea of what I might hope for in a boarding house for the small sum which I was prepared to spend. The cheaper places were, of course, the least attractive; the halls seemed dingier, the odor of dreary, bygone dinners more pervasive in them; the servants were more slatternly, the landladies themselves more rusty, dusty and depressing. There were innumerable parlors furnished in upholstery that made up in accumulated dust and aroma for what it had lost in freshness of color during the years of its service; there were folding beds of every sort; there were lace curtains, and there were pier glasses between the long front windows. Then, somewhere up on the top floor, there was a hall bedroom without a closet, without heat; but “the last lady”—marvelously adaptable female!—had always found the hooks under the cambric curtain on the door an ample refuge for her gowns, and as for the temperature, she had been compelled to keep her window open during most of the winter before, so intense was the heat from the hall. She had moved, apparently, in search of a harder spiritual discipline than she could obtain among such comfortable surroundings. Certainly there was no other reason for her leaving.
Sometimes, departing from the lists furnished me, I stumbled upon wonderful places where “cozy corners” greatly prevailed, and where the landladies wore trailing negligées of soiled pink or blue instead of the tight-fitting black uniform of the other houses. Whenever such a meeting inadvertently occurred, the gorgeous landlady and I were always as eager as civility would permit to see the last of each other.