“Have you written many stories about crooks?” I inquired, for, though she always spoke of herself as an author and of everything she did, even the tea-room she was planning, as a means of getting material for her “real work,” she had never mentioned the names of her stories. “Not yet.” She panted so vigorously and her eyes shone so eagerly that I was sure of having touched a subject she liked. “You see I specialize on one type at a time. My last before taking up crooks was newsboys.” “You wrote a newsboy story?” “Newsboys who had made a fortune of one hundred thousand dollars and over. It was colossal. The editor told a friend of mine that it was the greatest spread that ever appeared in ——” “Spread?” I interrupted. “I thought you said you wrote short stories.” “Story-writing as you understand it is a dead art,” she assured me solemnly. “Pictures! The future of the picture story is colossal.” That night before I fell asleep for the first time in my new quarters, I decided that Hildegarde was not one who would understand my determination to live in the tenements. I never confided in her. During the months that followed, working day after day in the tenements, from eight-thirty in the morning to five of an afternoon, I never lost sight of that determination. Having decided to sublet a small furnished flat, I was continually on the lookout for it. Before I finally found such a flat, Miss O’Brien had demanded my room. “Miss Porter, Miss Porter.” She was standing on the parlor floor as she shouted up the stairs to me on the top floor. “I want your room, an’ I want it at onct. An’ I want you should know I’m a lady—I’ll not be insulted in my own house.” The insult referred to was a note left on the hat-rack at the front door that morning on my way to work. In it I objected to having a strange man sleep in my bed during the day, while I was at work. In Greenwich Village, when the origin of tobacco-smoke is feminine, it is invariably accompanied by crums of face-powder and smudges of rouge. There were no such marks on my bureau. But the odor of tobacco-smoke in the sheets of the bed! The signs of soot and grease grimed hands on my towels! I was paying four dollars and a half for my room, small with a slanting roof and a half-window on the top floor. I had no intention of sharing it with an unknown man even for the sake of helping my grunting, groaning landlady. In more ways than one Miss O’Brien was out of the ordinary. Her name, her religion, and her brogue to the contrary, she boasted of being English. As a consequence she was not descended from an Irish king nor did she have a saint in her family. She was red-hot for suffrage, because she wanted a law passed to force women working outside the home to make their own beds and clean their own rooms.