Once more we assembled to eat and chat and relax.  After a moment by the kitchen pump we took our places at table.  Our hostess waited upon us.  “It takes some grit,” she explained, “and more grace to keep boarders.”  Except on Sundays, when all men might be considered equals in the sight of the Lord, she and her husband did not eat until we had finished.  She passed the dishes of our frugal evening meal—­potatoes, bread and butter and cake—­and as we served ourselves she held her head in the opposite direction, as if to say, “I’m not looking; take the biggest piece.”

It was with my roommates I became the soonest acquainted.  The butcher’s widow from Batavia was a grumbler.  “How do you like your job?” I asked her as we fumbled about in the dim light of our low-roofed room.

“Oh, Lordy,” was the answer, “I didn’t think it would be like this.  I’d rather do housework any day.  I bet you won’t stay two weeks.”  She was ugly and stupid.  She had been married young to a butcher.  Left alone to battle with the world, she might have shaken out some of her dullness, but the butcher for many years had stood between her and reality, casting a still deeper shadow on her ignorance.  She had the monotony of an old child, one who questions constantly but who has passed the age when learning is possible.  The butcher’s death had opened new possibilities.  After a period of respectful mourning, she had set out, against the wishes of her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was expressed not so much in words as in a certain picture hat trimmed with violet chiffon and carried carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new, crisp sateen petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one o’clock to finish the night before she left home.  It was inevitable that the butcher’s widow should be disappointed.  There was too much grim reality in ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling mill room to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd years were no accomplice to romance.  She grumbled and complained.  Secret dissatisfaction preyed upon her.  She was somewhat exasperated at the rest of us, who worked cheerily and with no arriere pensee.  At the end of the first week the picture hat was tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the sateen petticoat and the daring swish of the golf skirt were packed up, like the remains of a bubble that had reflected the world in its brilliant sides one moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds.  She had gone behind in her work steadily at the factory; she was not making more than sixty cents a day.  She left us and went back to do housework in Batavia.