Pushing it open, they entered, not a house, but a narrow alley between two buildings. Along one wall was a bed of flowers and green borders, and hidden among them were small floodlights which gave a gentle, guiding glow. At its end, the alley opened into a little courtyard with a small fountain and a statue of a nymph surrounded by canvas lawn chairs. Fronting on it was an old, low, white-brick house, its door opened wide. Connie came out to greet them.
“I see you didn’t have any trouble finding our hideaway,” she said. “I must be a good map-maker.”
Tactfully refraining from telling her about the wrong turns, Peggy and Amy agreed with her.
“What a wonderful place you have here!” Peggy said. “However did you find it?”
“I didn’t find it,” Connie said. “I found Linda Lewis, my roommate, which was a good deal easier. She was already living here, and when her roommate got married, she asked me if I’d move in.”
“And how did she find it?” Amy asked.
“Same way,” Connie laughed. “These places get passed along from friend to friend. You could hunt for apartments every day for a year and never even see a place like this. You just have to know somebody, or be lucky. I’d hate to show you the miserable place I lived in before I moved in here.”
“Here” proved to be a spacious room with an extraordinarily high ceiling and a fireplace with a tremendous copper hood. An open stairway mounted up one wall to a landing, then turned a corner and went up again. The only other room downstairs was a kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bath.
“That’s the whole house,” Connie explained. “It used to be a carriage house for one of the big places on the street, before all the big places were turned into apartments. Now come on in and meet everybody.”
Linda Lewis, Connie’s roommate, rose from the piano bench to greet the girls. She had apparently been playing until the bell had announced their arrival. Linda was a tall, slim, rather plain girl with a sweet smile who was a music student at Juilliard, considered by most people to be the best music school in the country. She greeted them shyly, and returned to her place at the keyboard, where she began playing quietly, as if to herself.