“Oh! I mistook you for one of them laundry-workers,” she told me apologetically. “They’re always ringing me up this time mornings, though it do seem like they’d a-found out by now we ain’t goin’ to take ’em in however often they come.” “Then you have vacancies?” I asked in surprise as she led the way to the reception-room of the home. “Sure! Plenty of them for the kind of girls we want. What price was you expectin’ to pay?” She accepted, with a gracious smile, my promise to call on her in case I decided to come there to live. While waiting for Alice my eyes wandered speculatively about the bleak little room, and I wondered how much she was paying. “Four dollars a week for my room and two meals a day,” she told me, replying to one of my first questions. “That is one reason I wrote instead of waiting to call on you. I thought you might know of a better place?” “You don’t suppose you could find a place for less money?” Her discontent nettled me, for I had more than half made up my mind to come there to live. “For less money!” Alice shrugged her shoulders. “It means paying four dollars a week for my room. The meals are simply uneatable.” Then she explained her presence in New York. Being disappointed in the teacher’s position obtained immediately on leaving college she had given it up and hastened to New York, confident that she would be able to get just the place she wished. “It’s the wrong season. All the agencies tell me they haven’t a thing in my line.” Then she added, with a snap of determination in both her tone and manner: “I’m not going back to Washington City—having people say that I can’t hold down a job. I answered an advertisement in Sunday’s paper and got a place with Jones Brothers directing envelopes and folding circulars.” My interest became personal. Polly Preston would be able to direct envelopes and fold circulars. “What do they pay you?” Alice shook her head. “When the manager heard that I had been getting twenty-five dollars a week, he said he was ashamed to tell me what they paid. He asked what was the least I would come for. I don’t see how any one can possibly live on less than twelve dollars a week in New York. Do you?” “He’ll give you more than that,” was my confident assurance. “He knows you’re a college woman. He wouldn’t think of paying you less than fifteen, maybe twenty. If you will let me pay for my breakfast——” “Don’t you do it,” Alice interrupted, grabbing me by the arm. “The bread is stale and cold, the butter is uneatable, the coffee is not coffee at all, and the milk is skimmed until it is a blue-green. You won’t be able to eat a thing, and they’ll charge you thirty cents for it.” While thirty cents did not, at that time, seem to me a great price to pay for a breakfast, stale bread and blue-green milk was not tempting. Though my plans had never included a second person, it now occurred to me that if Alice wished to join me she might be of real assistance as well as a pleasant companion.