LI. “WE LOOK UPON WOMEN AS SACRED” 302 LII. THE OLD FACE 309 LIII. THE WHITE LIGHT AGAIN 315 THE PUBLIC SQUARE I 54 HARROW STREET A GIRL of nineteen had just arrived in New York, with one fat bag. She turned into the curving silence of Harrow Street, which is only three minutes’ walk from Washington Square, but some trick to find. Several times she changed her bag from one hand to the other, sometimes putting it down and stepping around it, until she came to a door with a room-to-rent sign. This house was painted fresh green, the only thing that distinguished it from all the other houses of the block, except the number, which was Fifty-four. “Here goes me!” she said, starting up the stone steps. She rang. The door before her didn’t open, but the basement door below did. A woman’s voice called, “Yes?” in rising inflection. The girl trailed her bag down to the walk and around the railing to the lower entrance where a dark-faced woman stood, regarding her with almost concerned attention--dark eyes that saw too much, the girl decided. The face was un-American, but its foreign suggestion was vague. It might even have been East Indian. If her skin was natively white, it had certainly known the darkening of much sunlight. As the girl drew near she sensed a curious freshness from the woman; something hard to name, having to do with the garments as well as the shadowy olive skin. “I want to rent a room--a small back room. I saw your sign on the door.” “I have a room, but it hasn’t much air,” the woman said. “I don’t need much air----” “Come and we’ll look. It is on the upper floor, but it is not quite back. Leave your bag here in the hall.” It was eleven in the morning, but the smell of coffee was in the dark basement corridor, and laughing voices were heard behind the shut door to the right. A man’s voice said in a stimulated tone: “Believe me, and I’ve been around, Miss Claes is the deepest-dyed sport I’ve ever met. You could drag her the length of Harrow Street and she’d come up fresh from the laundry----” “That reminds me, I’m going to start a laundry,” a woman’s voice announced. “I’m going to start something myself----” came another voice. The girl, following through the corridor, heard a little breathless sort of chuckle from the woman ahead of her on the dark stairs. The place smelled like a shut room when it rains--a cigaretty admixture. They climbed. The next hall was spooky with gaslight; the next was gay with frying sausages. They climbed. The next was the one, and it smelled of paint--the same green paint as on the outside of the house--on one of the doors and doorframes, but the wood was plainly charred under the paint. “We had a fire, but we put it out with wash water before the engines got here, soapy water.” The girl had a picture of threshing soap about in pails of water before applying it to the flames.