ly at her she
turned on her side, moaning as only a girl can moan when peace of mind
is gone forever. Such sounds were not uncommon in the dormitory. Several
times, waking in the night, I had listened pityingly to the same
half-smothered lament. On this night I had fallen asleep as usual, when
suddenly a shriek rang out, and I wakened to hear the angry accents of
the beldam protesting against "hysterics," and the indistinct muttering
of the girlish sleepers whose rest the stranger had so inconsiderately
disturbed. In a few moments everything was quiet again, our old woman
had renewed her snoring, and then the new-comer, repressing her anguish
as best she could, slid kneeling to the floor.

It was then, all sleep gone for that night, I reached out my hand and
touched the sleeve of her black dress.

From that moment we became friends. The information which she vouchsafed
about herself was meager and not of a character to throw much light upon
her former condition and environment. It was obvious that there had been
a tragedy in her life, and I instinctively guessed what that tragedy
was, although I respected the reserve she threw around her and asked no
indiscreet questions. She was fairly well educated, had been brought up
in a small New Jersey village, and had been a stenographer until she
went to a telephone office to tend a switchboard. Between that job and
her advent in the "home" was an obvious hiatus, which at times she
vaguely referred to as a period wherein she "lost her grip on
everything." She had no money, and her clothes were even shabbier than
my own, and she was too discouraged even to look for work. Her cot and
three meager meals a day, consisting of bread and tea for breakfast and
supper, and bread and coffee and soup for dinner, she received, as did
all the transient boarders, in return for a ten-hour-day's work in the
"home" kitchen. After a few nights she ceased moaning, and settled
gradually into a hopeless apathy, while over her deep gray eyes there
grew a film of silent misery.

Stirred by my fragmentary accounts of Eunice's wretchedness, the
generous-hearted Bessie one day suggested that we take her with us to
look for a job as soon as the anticipated "lay-off" notice came into
effect at Rosenfeld's. And so, on the Monday morning following that
dreaded event, Bessie met Eunice and me at the lower right-hand corner
of Broadway and Grand Street, and together we applied for work at the
R---- Underwe