“Kiss me again, Stephen!” she cried. Stephen jumped to the step beside her. She raised her lips to his. Suddenly he realized that she was crying.
“Goodbye, goose!” he said tenderly. As the train gathered speed, he swung back on the platform.
“Don’t worry!” called Miss Parrot again, dragging little Steve to his feet. The children were all waving wildly. Stephen threw a last kiss.
The porter led Jane firmly back into the vestibule and closed the train doors. She couldn’t see the family any longer. She hoped Miss Parrot would hold little Steve’s hand until they were out of the train-shed. It would be just like him to run out on the tracks. But she would, of course. She was very responsible.
Jane made her way slowly back through the narrow Pullman corridor to her seat in the parlour car. She was really off. She had not been in New York since she came home from Europe, eight years before. It would be fun to see Agnes again. The children would be perfectly safe with Miss Parrot. And she would be home in a week.
II
The heat of the September day still pervaded the city streets as Jane descended from the top of the Fifth Avenue bus and turned, a trifle uncertainly, under the arch, to walk south and west across Washington Square. Jane had had very little experience in looking after herself and she always felt a trifle uncertain when wandering alone in strange places. Earlier that very afternoon, in emerging from the Bay State Limited, she had found the congested turmoil of the Grand Central Station a little overwhelming. It had seemed quite an adventure to choose a black porter and follow him as he threaded his way through the crowded concourse and out past the swinging doors through the traffic of Forty-Second Street to the lobby of the Belmont Hotel.
Jane had felt just a little queer, as she stood alone at the desk, her luggage at her feet, signing the register and asking for a single room and bath for the night. It was perfectly ridiculous—she was thirty-six years old—but Jane really couldn’t remember ever having spent a night alone at a hotel before. She was very glad that Flora and Mr. Furness would join her at noon next day and greatly relieved to discover that a letter from Agnes was waiting for her, confirming her invitation to dinner and containing explicit directions as to how to reach the Greenwich Village flat.
“Come at six,” Agnes had written. “I get out of Macy’s at five-thirty and I’ll be there before you.”
She was perhaps a trifle early, reflected Jane, as she paused in the path to reassure herself as to just which direction was west. She had allowed too much time for the bus ride through the afternoon traffic. She had been glad to get out of her hotel bedroom. Once her bag was unpacked, there was nothing to do there but stare through the dingy lace curtain, which had seemed at once curiously starched and soiled, at the taxis and streetcars that congested Forty-Second Street and the crowds of suburbanites who were pouring into the entrance of the Grand Central Station. She had watched the station clock for fifteen minutes and when the hands pointed to five she had left the room.
Washington Square, thought Jane, gazing curiously about her, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It didn’t look like the cradle from which a city’s aristocracy had sprung. There was a nice old row of redbrick houses at the north end, but many of them seemed rather gone to seed and dilapidated, and the grass in the Square was worn down to hard-caked mud and the elm trees were leafless, and the shirt-sleeved men and shawled women on the benches and the dirty little dark-eyed children who were playing marbles and hopscotch on the path were the kind that you would only see “west of Clark Street” at home.
Jane left the Square at the southwest corner and, referring once more to the written directions that Agnes had given her, plunged into the congestion of the city streets. This was a funny place to choose to live in, thought Jane, as she pushed through a group of pale-faced little girls, skipping rope on the sidewalk. It was a funny place to choose in which to bring up a child. A group of shabby young men, hanging about the entrance of a corner saloon, commented favourably on her appearance as she approached them. Jane held her chin high and passed on in disdain. The green baize door swung open to admit an elderly hobo and Jane caught a whiff, across the stale heat of the pavement, of the acrid damp odour of beer. She thought the disreputable bar looked rather cool and dark and inviting from the glare of the city street. She could quite understand why the group of shabby young men liked to linger there.
At the next corner she stood amazed and delighted at the sight that met her eye. A curving vista of narrow street, flanked by tall redbrick houses trellised with iron fire escapes. The fire escapes were festooned with varicoloured washing and all the windows were wide open and the windowsills were hung with bedding. From nearly every window a dark-haired woman and a couple of children were hanging out, leaning on the bedding and gazing down at the street beneath them. The street itself was crowded with push carts and fruit stands. Great piles of golden oranges and yellow bananas were displayed for sale. Clothing hung fluttering from improvised frame scaffolds. A fish vendor was crying his wares at her elbow. The front steps of all the houses were crowded with people laughing and talking together and shouting to the purchasers that clustered about the open-air booths. The dingy store on the corner had a sign in its dirty window, “Ice—kindling—coal and charcoal.”
