Then there were other places—airy, clean and bright, with parlors guiltless of any suggestion of the folding bed, with graceful furnishings, efficient servants, cheerful landladies. But these were always either “full”—I don’t wonder—or what they had left was far beyond my humble means.
I wandered through the unhomelike splendors of the woman’s hotel, by and by. Here at least there would be no question of boarding house parlor etiquette—there were successions of charming, big, airy, handsomely fitted-out parlors; there were tea rooms, there were libraries and writing rooms. The bedrooms themselves—simple, sunny, clean—- were charming, with their chintz-frilled cots and their substantially made wooden pieces. Here I could live, by a pretty rigid system of economy, for nine dollars a week—four for my tiny bedroom, five for my breakfasts and dinners. I would have to share the sparkling white and nickel bathroom with only two others.
I was not one of those haughty souls who revolted at the rule forbidding masculine callers above the parlor floors; in the first place, I had not been long enough in New York to know that young women ever did receive callers save in drawing rooms of some description, and in the second, I didn’t expect any callers for a long time. Once Robert Matthews saw me safely settled, I knew that his neighborly kindness would dwindle; and he was my only possible visitor at present. No, one might be very comfortable at the woman’s hotel, I was sure—if one could overcome a prejudice against being one of a mass. I had been long enough at the Margaret Louisa to know that I abhorred whatever savored of an institution, and all women in bulk, so to speak. Even a dingy hall room in a dreary boarding house, with the fumes of old dinners wrought into the very web of the carpets, and a lackadaisically suspicious landlady, seemed better and more homelike to me than the comforts and luxuries of a big feminized institution. At least, in the boarding house, one could be an individual, something more than a number.
However, though I had made up my mind to the boarding house, I did not come to it. And that was because of the unwelcome other occupant of the room at the Margaret Louisa. She had proved to be a wholesome, graceful, rather tall woman of thirty-three or so. She had none of my rustic air of sullen doubt when she met strangers. She was polite, uninquisitive, even uninterested. Her attitude was the perfection of civil indifference; she would have been an ideal woman to occupy the opposite section on a transcontinental train, or the other berth in a transatlantic stateroom, for she was perfectly considerate, unfamiliar and impersonal. She told me that she had just come from a summer abroad—she was a teacher of some handicraft in a trade school for girls—and that she was staying at the Margaret Louisa until “the doctor was through redecorating the house.”
“Of course everyone makes fun of the Maggie Lou,” she said, “but I find it an admirable refuge. It is in the center of the town; it’s clean, cheap and respectable; it charges a fair price for the accommodations it offers, so that there’s no taint of philanthropy about it—though sometimes the managers seem to forget that. One doesn’t come here for society. Once one knows its little red-tape rules, and how to keep them from interfering with one’s personal liberty, it’s a very comfortable place.”
It developed that a woman physician of Miss Putnam’s acquaintance had a small house on West Eleventh Street, the upper floors of which she let to women lodgers.
“Of course she knows us all,” said Miss Putnam. “It’s really very convenient. There aren’t more than six of us; we are absolutely independent, without being brutally isolated. Dr. Lyons serves us all with breakfast in our rooms, and leaves us to solve the luncheon-dinner problem for ourselves. It’s a charming, old-fashioned house, and she has furnished it in character.”
I sighed bitterly. Dr. Lyons’ six lodgers paid her five dollars and a half a week for their rooms and their simple breakfasts—as little as I should have to pay at the huge caravansary which I was even then considering—and they had a home! I could have wept over the inequalities of life.
Later I wept in very truth. Robert had sent me a note inviting me to a glee-club concert. I had accepted the invitation. Then I had rubbed my aching body with witch hazel—it’s no small athletic feat to climb to the top of twenty-seven New York houses in one day—and I had lain down to rest. A little before seven I bethought me of clothes. The black silk which mother had made for me, with its pretty chemisette and cuffs of real Val and Indian mull, and my black net hat with white roses, lay in the trunk in the trunk room. I made up my mind to swallow a hasty dinner, invade the cellar and carry my poor little finery upstairs after dinner, so as to be ready for Bob at eight. At seven-fifteen, having eaten all that I could in the banging, crowded, steaming dining room, I approached the office and made known my wish to go to the trunk room.
“Trunk room closes at seven,” snapped the waitress of destiny.