We have frequent calls from the elevator boy, who brings us ice and various provisions.  Both men, I notice, take their work easily.  During the morning a busy Irish woman comes hurrying into our precincts.

“Say,” she yells in a shrill voice, “my cauliflowers ain’t here, are they?  I ordered ’em early and they ain’t came yet.”

Without properly waiting for an answer she hurries away again.

The coloured cook turns to the elevator boy understandingly: 

“Just like a woman!  Why, before I’d make a fuss about cauliflowers or anything else!”

About eleven the head forewoman stops in to eat a plate of rice and milk.  While I am cutting bread for the two hundred I hear her say to the cook in a gossipy tone: 

“How do you like the new girl?  She’s here all alone.”

I am called away and do not hear the rest of the conversation.  When I return the cook lectures me in this way: 

“Here alone, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I see no reason why you shouldn’t get along nicely and not kill yourself with work either.  Just stick at it and they’ll do right by you.  Lots o’ girls who’s here alone gets to fooling around.  Now I like everybody to have a good time, and I hope you’ll have a good time, too, but you mustn’t carry it too far.”

My mind went back as he said this to a conversation I had had the night before with a working-girl at my boarding-house.

“Where is your home?” I asked.

She had been doing general housework, but ill-health had obliged her to take a rest.

She looked at me skeptically.

“We don’t have no homes,” was her answer.  “We just get up and get whenever they send us along.”

And almost as a sequel to this I thought of two sad cases that had come close to my notice as fellow boarders.

I was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in the parlour.  The matron had gone out and left me to “answer the door.”  The bell rang and I opened cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving the snow and sleet about on the winter air.  A young girl came in; she was seeking a lodging.  Her skirts and shoes were heavy with water.  She took off her things slowly in a dazed manner.  Her short, quick breathing showed how excited she was.  When she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her eyes moved about restlessly.  She stopped abruptly now and then and contracted her brows as though in an appeal for merciful tears; then she continued in the same broken, husky voice: 

“I suppose I’m not the only one in trouble.  I’ve thought a thousand times over that I would kill myself.  I suppose I loved him—­but I hate him now.”

These two sentences, recurring, were the story’s all.

The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was pleasure had been shared—­these were the thoughts and feelings breeding hatred.