“Books!” her mother had said with an exclamation of disappointment when they had been received the preceding December. “A whole pile of old-fashioned books!”

Laurel knew her mother preferred something more modern, when it came to printed matter—informing literature that kept one up-to-date as to what was going on in the world of clothes, and fashion, and society; Photoplay magazine, with some theater-talk in them, and a few snappy short stories. The table in the bedroom which Laurel shared with her mother was always littered with a dog-eared collection of such periodicals.

Laurel took the elevator up to that bedroom now. It was after six o’clock, and by this time, she calculated, the ironing-sheet and forbidden electric-iron would be safely tucked out of sight in the bottom of her mother’s trunk.

3

IT WASN’T AN attractive bedroom. It was tucked away up under the eaves, had slanting walls, and a single curtainless window. Its furniture was much too big for it—made it look sick and shrunken, like a child in cast-off clothes many sizes too large. The iron bed, white enamel once but nicked and battered now, extended halfway across the window-pane; and there was a perfectly tremendous stuffed armchair in the room, discarded from some parlor below evidently, a shabby affair which, shut up in this little coop, was like some big ugly animal crammed into a circus cage—a rhinoceros, Laurel decided, for it was the same dingy color, and its back and arms were worn bare and napless.

The walls of the room were covered with unpleasant reminders of former occupants—long brown streaks made by the striking of sulphur matches, oil-stains, ink-spots, splotches where flies and mosquitoes had met bloody deaths, and bruises here and there exuding dry plaster. Behind the commode the faded, jaundiced-colored paper bore the whitish, pocked appearance of a face once swept by smallpox; and where the bed was shoved close against the wall, the paper was rubbed shiny and amber-colored. Laurel thought it was the worst “cheapest room” that she and her mother had ever occupied for a whole season.

Laurel was experienced in cheapest rooms. They were all more or less alike. That is, there was always something chronic and incurable the matter with them. They were either up very high beneath the eaves, possibly a floor above where the elevator ran, or down very low beside a noisy service-room, or groaning elevator-shaft. Some of them had queer smells. Some developed queer smells. Most of them were furnished with discards, and all of them were equipped with the everlasting commode, bowl-and-pitcher, and unlovely slop-basin.