ough the
summer, at least. Surely, I could become established somewhere by fall.

I didn't know how to approach my problem. I didn't know what
advertisements in the newspapers were the false ones. I felt shy about
applying for work at stores and shops. For whom should I ask? To what
department present myself? What should I say first? One day I told a
benevolent-looking woman, one of the officers at the Y. W. C. A., the
truth about myself, that I, and not my mother's parlor-maid, was
occupying the room in the lodging-house. Not until that woman put her
hand kindly on my shoulder and advised me to go home--did I realize how
determined I had become. New York had not devoured me, the lodging-house
had not harmed me. I had found I could sleep, and very well, too, on the
lumpy, slumped-in cot with the soiled spread. No one climbed the
fire-escape, no one tried my locked door at night. I had pawned my last
winter's furs, but my character seemed quite clean and unsmirched. Go
home! Of course I wasn't going home. Not yet. The lady gave me a list of
reputable employment agencies at last. If Mrs. Plummet's hadn't daunted
me, employment offices couldn't either, I said. I was told to provide
suitable references.

Now references were just what I couldn't very well provide. I had left
home under disagreeable circumstances. I tried to make it clear without
too much detail that, except for my sister, my connections with my
people were severed, and I couldn't apply to Lucy. I hadn't even given
her my actual address. She would be sure to come looking me up, or send
some one in her place. Very likely she would ask my brother Malcolm to
drop in on me sometime. I was in deadly fear I would run across him on
the street, and if Malcolm had ever smelled the inside of the house
where I roomed, I fear his nose never would have come down. If Lucy had
ever seen the dirt on the stairs she would have pronounced the house
disreputable, and dragged me home. Secrecy was my only chance for
success, at least for a while. I would have to discover what could be
done without references.

It was due to a little new trick I learned of looking on at myself that
it was not impossible for me to seek a position through an employment
agency. I had become, you see, one of those characters I had read about
in short stories dozens of times before--an unemployed girl in New York,
even to the hall-bedroom, the handkerchiefs stuck on my window-pane in
process of ironi