. Bridget Reynolds at
the door of the Bleecker Street lunch-room, she to go her way and I to
go mine. I looked back when I had got half a block away, and she was
still standing there, apparently undetermined which way to turn. I
watched a moment, and presently she ambled across the street and rattled
the door of the "ladies'" entrance to the saloon on the corner. Then I
turned my face toward the reddening east, against which the shabby
housetops and the chimneys and the distant spires and smokestacks
stretched out in a broken, black sky-line. I was going to find the home
for working girls which the good matron at Jefferson Market had
recommended, and the address of which I still had in the bottom of my
purse.

XI

I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS

The spirit of the early Easter Day had breathed everywhere its own
ineffable Sabbath peace, and when at last I emerged into Broadway, it
was to find that familiar thoroughfare strangely transformed. On the six
days preceding choked with traffic and humming with ten thousand noises,
it was now silent and deserted as a country lane--silent but for the
echo of my own footsteps upon the polished stone flagging, and deserted
but for the myriad reflections of my own disheveled self which the great
plate-glass windows on either side of the street flashed back at me.

My way lay northward, with the spire of Grace Church as a finger-post.
Grace Church had become a familiar landmark in the preceding weeks, so
often had I walked past it in my hopeless quest, and now I approached it
as one does a friend seen suddenly in a crowd of strangers. The fact
that I was approaching an acquaintance, albeit a dumb and unseeing one,
now made me for the first time conscious of my personal appearance so
persistently reflected by the shop windows. Before one of them I stopped
and surveyed myself. Truly I was a sorry-looking object. I had not been
well washed or combed since the last morning at Mrs. Pringle's house;
for two days I had combed my long and rather heavy hair with one of the
small side-combs I wore, and on neither morning had I enjoyed the luxury
of soap. And two successive mornings without soap and the services of a
stout comb are likely to work all sorts of demoralizing transformations
in the appearance of even a lady of leisure, to say nothing of a girl
who had worked hard all day in a dirty factory.

Fortunately the street was deserted. I stepped into the entr