One of these secrets began to hint at its own hideous nature with every convulsive tick of the metre.  It hiccuped nickels, and as Win’s terrified eyes, instead of taking in New York, watched the spendthrift contrivance yelping for her dollars, she remembered that she owned but two hundred.  She had had to be “decent” about tips on board.  But forty pounds—­two hundred dollars—­had looked magnificent in her hand bag that morning.  Paper money spread itself in such a lordly manner and seemed able to buy so many separate things.  But by the time the merciless taxi had bumped her through devious ways up to Fifty-Fourth Street, three of the beautiful green dollar bills were as good as gone.

She longed to pray “Oh, do stop taxying!” at the doorstep before she darted up to inquire whether Miss Hampshire still kept the boarding-house; and it was maddening to hear that “teuf, teuf” desperately going on, chewing its silver cud, in the long pause before an answer came to the bell.

A black woman who flung open the door was startling as a jack-in-the-box for the English girl.  Win had thought of American negroes but vaguely, as a social problem in the newspapers or dear creatures in Thomas Nelson Page’s books.  What with the surprise and the nervous strain of the disappearing dollars, she asked no further questions after the welcome news that Miss Hampshire existed and had a “room to rent.”  Hastily she paid off the chauffeur, adding something for himself (it seemed like tipping the man at the guillotine) and breathed again only when her trunk and dressing-bag blocked the narrow hall.

“I’m sure I don’t see whoever’s goin’ to tote them things up to the third story,” sighed the female jack-in-the-box, who was, after all, more purple than black when you looked closely, an illusion produced by a dusting of pink powder over a dark surface.  “And how do I know Miss Hampshire’ll take you?”

“But you said there was a room.”  The freeborn independence of a whole nation, irrespective of colour, shocked the effete stranger’s breath away.  She gasped slightly.

“Yeh.  But that ain’t to say you can have it.  Miss Hampshire’s mighty pertickler about her woman boarders,” explained the purple lady.  “You catched me all of a heap or I wouldn’t o’ let that feller slam yer things into the house and git away.  You’ll have to wait till I call Miss Hampshire. She’ll talk to you.”

“Tell her I was recommended by Miss Ellis, from London who boarded here three years ago,” Win desperately tossed after a disappearing figure.

It was a mortifying commentary upon her personal appearance not to be invited to wait in the drawing-room, and Miss Child wondered what foreign strangeness in hat, hair arrangement, or costume had excited suspicion.  She did not know whether to be more angry or amused, but recalled her own motto, “Laugh at the world to keep it from laughing first.”