Suddenly the episode became part of an adventure, a great and wildly funny adventure, of which she was dying to see the next part.  How she would love to tell Mr. Balm of Gilead!  How his eyes would twinkle!  But—­there was no Mr. Balm of Gilead in this or any world.  It was a dreary hall she stood in, with varnished brown paper pretending to be oak panels, a long-armed hatrack that would have made an ideal scarecrow, and ghosts of past dinners floating up from below with gloomy warnings.

From the same region came Miss Hampshire, smelling slightly of Irish stew.  She was pale with the pallor which means shut windows and furnace heat, a little sharp-nosed, neat-headed woman in brown, whose extraordinarily deep-set eyes were circled with black, like spectacle rims.  She was graciously willing to accept a guest recommended by Miss Ellis, hinting that, as she was of British ancestry, the English for her came under the favoured nation clause.

“To you the room with board’ll be ten dollars a week,” she said with flattering emphasis.  “A well-known poetess has just left it to be married.  It’s not large, but, being at the back of the house, it’s nice and quiet.”

When Win was shown the third-floor back hall bedroom she saw that even a poetess of passion might have snapped at her first proposal.  As Miss Hampshire said, it was not large; but there was the advantage of being able to reach anything anywhere while sitting on the bed, and unless the people six feet distant in a back room of the opposite house snored at night it ought to be quiet.

Win christened her room the “frying pan,” because to search for another boarding-house might be jumping into the fire.  And luckily her trunk would just squeeze under the bed.

“I suppose it would be no use calling on a business man before three o’clock?” She applied to Miss Hampshire for advice when she had unpacked her toothbrush and a few small things for which she could find niche or wall space.

“Before three?  And why not?” The pale lady opened her eyes in their dark caverns.

“Why, I only thought they wouldn’t be back in their offices from luncheon,” explained the English girl.

“When you know a little more about N’York,” replied Miss Hampshire, whose manner was involuntarily less mellow when she had hooked a fish, “you’ll see why it could never be run as it is along those lines.  Many of our most prominent business men consider a piece of pie with a tumbler of milk a good and sufficient lunch, and it takes them five minutes to swallow it.”

Primed with this information and intricate instructions concerning street cars (a child once burned dreads a taxi), Winifred started out soon after her own midday meal, eaten in a basement dining-room.

She went first to see the editor; for somehow newspaper reporting seemed more congenial to the vivid New York climate than singing in a church choir, and the hugeness of the To-day and To-morrow building turned her again into a worm.  It did not so much scrape the sky as soar into it, and when she timidly murmured the words “editorial offices” she was shot up to the top in an elevator as in a perpendicularly directed catapult.