Quickly turning toward the door from which direction the call appeared to come, I as quickly remembered that my mother had been in her grave more than fourteen years. Without thought, moved entirely by instinct, I slipped by the woman and out of the room. Halting on the stairs between her and the door I explained that it seemed to me wiser to consult Alice before definitely deciding. Out on the streets my cheeks tingled with shame. Was I a fool or a coward or both? There had been nothing suspicious about the woman and certainly her house was more attractive than any on the Y. W. list. Out there in the sunlight it seemed the height of absurdity to imagine that my mother had spoken to me. Deciding to telephone Alice and ask her to meet me at the house on her way from work I turned toward Third Avenue to look for the nearest drug-store. Discovering that I was almost under the eaves of a home for deaconesses, it occurred to me that they might have a list of decent rooming-houses in that neighborhood. At any rate, I reasoned, they would certainly be in a position to reassure me about the house I had just left. While the little deaconess who opened the door was going over her list of rooms looking for a vacancy, I mentioned having called at a house on that block, giving the number. “Oh, my dear!” she exclaimed. “You mustn’t think of going there. That house has been raided by the police three times within the past month.” When at last she found a rooming-house on her list not marked “filled” she gave me the address. Within half an hour I had taken and paid for exactly what Alice and I had set our hearts on—two small clean rooms on the top floor in the back of an old-fashioned house in a convenient and decent neighborhood. “Of course we shall have to keep our living expenses within what you are now paying,” I told Alice that evening, when she stopped in on her way from work. “Two dollars and a half each a week for rent and one dollar and a half each for our household budget. It would have been nicer if you could have moved to-night.” “I’d have come quick enough,” Alice retorted. “You told me not to dare to come before Tuesday.” “Certainly. You have paid until Tuesday noon. You cannot afford to give that home the price of five meals and three nights’ room-rent. We are out to learn the value of money, not how to spend it.” “I don’t believe we’ll get very much to spend,” Alice replied despondently. “Everything in New York seems very expensive. Maybe the food they give us at the Home is as good as——” “Stop it! If you knew the price of foodstuffs in the push-cart markets you’d know that three dollars a week will give two women all they can eat—provided they do their own cooking and use common sense in buying.” “Will you do the buying for the first week?” Alice demanded.