But that atmosphere of near-contentment did not continue long after the close of the war. During my last year in the underbrush, the working world—including office-workers—had become as one huge caldron simmering, simmering, simmering with suspicion, fear, and hate. One of the chief causes, in New York City, at least, is the housing condition. While the homes of the rich in the Golden Zone remain untenanted the year round, the tenements are so enormously congested that decent family life is next to impossible. Children and young people are forced to spend their leisure time outside their homes. One result of which is the rapid increase in crime—the so-called “crime wave.” Because I am convinced that these conditions in America are brought about chiefly by lack of understanding, I shall write in the chapters that follow my experience during my four years spent as a working woman in New York City. And I shall earnestly try to show conditions as they actually exist. The bits of conversations given will be taken directly from my diary, and are as nearly _verbatim_ as I could write when each incident was fresh in my mind. How long I stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, on that November morning, which now seems both so near and so far away, it is impossible for me to say. The spell that gripped me was broken by a sound like a whisper of a roar that increased until, with a clanking crash, an elevated train came to a halt at Third Avenue and Forty-second Street. Turning down Fifth Avenue I set out in search of Alice Tompkins. Across Bryant Park a single lighted window near the top of a tall building flared out. In the east the waning moon hung a silver crescent against the purple-black curtain of fathomless space. CHAPTER II MY FIRST STEPS IN THE UNDERBRUSH A note from Alice Tompkins had been among the batch of mail handed me the night before as I left the National Art Club. She was in New York, and particularly wished to see me, as soon as convenient. “Had she given up her teacher’s position in the school for defective children?” I wondered, on my way to look her up. “And why was she stopping in such an out-of-the-way corner of the lower West Side?” Though I loitered over the three miles and more of streets it was not quite seven o’clock when I rang the bell at the home for working girls which I found at the number given in Alice’s note. The stare of indignant protest hurled at me by the woman who opened the door! “No,” she snapped, without giving me time to speak, “we haven’t got a vacancy. Everything’s filled up.” And she would have banged the door shut had I not put my foot in the opening. “I’m calling on a guest,” I hastened to say, and taking out Alice’s note I offered it as proof.