I did not let her finish.
“Do you mean that there’s a chance for me in the Eleventh Street house?” I demanded. I had been to seven boarding houses in furthest Harlem that day and had heard seven boarding house keepers declare that the time from One Hundred and Eighteenth Street to Wall was twenty minutes!
By the next morning my trunk had been rescued from the cave of the trunks, and stood, unstrapped and unlocked, in my sloping-roofed, attic room in the old-fashioned house of Dr. Lyons. The sunlight poured in through two dormer windows. There were dimity curtains at them. There was a blue-and-white, hit-or-miss rag rug on the floor. There was a fireplace; there were old-fashioned chairs that might have come out of an Agonquitt attic; there was a plain table, with blotters on it and bookshelves above; there was a cot covered with an old homespun blue-and-white cover. There were potted geraniums and primroses on the wide window shelves. I sat down and fairly rocked in my delight.
“An attic!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I didn’t believe there was one in all New York. And a rag carpet——”
But the language of jubilation failed.
Well, my fortnight of grace was ended. I was housed, by a kindly miracle and no skill of my own, comfortably, charmingly, not expensively. I was a lucky young woman!
I polished my boots to the highest pitch of brilliancy, I set my stock on at the most accurate angle, and I proceeded to Mr. George Hennen’s office to gladden his heart with the information that I had arrived.
He received me with some embarrassment—a good-looking, slender, boyish man with an inattentive manner.
“I had meant to write,” he murmured. “Really, it has been unpardonable. But I didn’t know until last week, and—it is really unpardonable.”
A cold chill gripped me. Was I not to have the position, after all? I sat very rigid, my fingers frozen in their stiff calfskin gloves.