nellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived
in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable
except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably
crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was
impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit
of her social life had to be lived out of the house.

When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about
with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or
even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city
neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of
thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the
doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So
one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the
lodger to a dance.

The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building
which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the
front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny
Sullivan Social Club."

The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat
check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a
waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which
followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric
lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest
best with a popular waltz tune.

In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat
and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was
piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When
the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with
the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.

"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her
head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent
free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy
a beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of
it."

I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she
learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish
dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable
by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
Sometimes they even nail t