She turned into a cross-street, full of refulgent drinking-places that beckoned by swinging doors, behind which were the voices of singers and through which passed, in alone and out with shame-faced men, unending streams of women with white faces and vermillion mouths and sadly encircled eyes. But Mary pressed westward, though she did not clearly know her intention until, having crossed two avenues, she found that the cafés gave place to small shops, and that the shops were giving place to tall, moldy buildings with long stairways before them, houses that had once, plainly, made homes, but that were now, as plainly, barracks for lodgers. From one of these she saw come a slight girl under a huge hat heavy with two great plumes. Mary waited until this girl drew near, first hesitated when she observed that the girl was scarcely fifteen, then spoke when she noted the bedizened dress and the face of which the childish beauty had been trained to maturity and hardness. "Can you tell me if I can get a room around here?" she inquired. The girl's knowing eyes studied her. "Hello!" she said. "When did you hit the road?" "To-day. I want to find a room." "Well, you can't go wrong. The house I live in is full-up; but you can ring 'most any bell along here and get what you want. There ain't no choice. One's as bum as another." She nodded saucily and went on her way, and Mary climbed the steps of the first house she came to. Her ring was answered by a woman that appeared, as far as Mary could observe in the faint light, to be about sixty years old. Her hair was gray and severely arranged; her dress was shabby, and she looked very tired. To Mary she did not seem to be at all the type that would conduct the sort of place which the wanderer just then needed. "Can you rent me a room?" she nevertheless inquired. "With privileges?" asked the woman. It was a phrase new to its hearer, but she understood that it described the kind of room she wanted. "Yes," she almost whispered. But the woman did not lower her voice. Her descent, as Mary afterwards learned, had been by slow stages, and her complaisance had been enforced through a history that began with the establishment of a respectable boarding-house, when a reform-election had driven her husband from the police-force, passed through a widowhood imposed upon by absconding lodgers and raised house-rents, and ended by the admission of first one and then many patrons that were, though they wanted what she had not always cared to give, at least certain to pay what she had to turn over to the church-corporation that owned the property. "I got a nice second-floor front, just a step from the bath-room, at eighteen dollars," she said. "A month?" inquired Mary. The woman regarded her as if she were somewhat of a curiosity. "Certainly not: eighteen a week." "Oh, I--I couldn't afford that." "It's a nice room." "Yes, I guess it is, but----" "I might let it to you for fifteen, to start with."