Ever since I have been allowed alone on a railroad train, the
Y. W. C. A. has been preached to me as a perfectly safe place to ask
advice in case of being stranded in a strange city. So I trudged down
there one late afternoon and procured a list of several lodging-houses,
where my mother's young parlor-maid could stay for a week with safety
while we were moving from our summer house. I didn't know whether I
could bring myself really to undress and get into the little cot in
the room which I finally engaged, but at least the room had a window.
I could sit by that. I had been assured that the place was reputable.
I moved down there in a taxicab one rainy Saturday afternoon. Lucy had
sent me my trunk, and I had to convey it somehow. I didn't sleep at all
the first night. There was a fire-escape immediately outside my open
window, and there was not a sign of a lock on the door. On Monday I
bought a screw-eye and hook for fifteen cents, and put nails in the
sash for burglar stops.

At first I used to crawl back to that smelly little hall bedroom at the
earliest sign of dusk; at first, if a man on the street spoke to me, I
would tremble for five minutes afterward; at first the odor of the
continual boiling of mutton bones and onions that met me every time I
opened the door of Mrs. Plummet's lodging-house used to make me feel
sick to my stomach. I became hardened as time went on, but at first it
was rather awful. I don't like to recall those early experiences of
mine.

I learned a great deal during my first fortnight at Mrs. Plummet's. I
never knew, for instance, that one meal a day, eaten at about four
o'clock in the afternoon, takes the place of three, very comfortably, if
aided and abetted in the morning by crackers spread with peanut butter,
and a glass of milk, a whole bottle of which one could buy for a few
cents at the corner grocery store. The girl who roomed next door to me
gave me lots of such tips. I had no idea that there were shops on shabby
avenues, where one could get an infinitesimal portion of what one paid
for a last season's dinner-gown; that furs are a wiser investment than
satin and lace; and that my single emerald could be more easily turned
into dollars and cents than all the enameled jewelry I owned put
together. The feeling of reenforcement that the contents of my trunk
gave me did a lot in restoring confidence. The girl next door and I
reckoned that their value in secondhand shops would see me thr