Part 50 (1/2)

”She's an awful creature. I'm afraid of her.”

Then that manly being, her husband, towered up in his wrath, saying, majestically, ”I guess I'm master in my own house yet.”

He showed poor Zell the door. Her laugh rang out recklessly, as she called--

”Good-by. May the pleasant thought that you have sent one more soul to perdition lull you to sweet sleep.”

But, for some reason, it did not. When they became cool enough to think it over, they admitted that perhaps they had been a ”little hasty.”

They had a daughter of about Zell's age. It would be a little hard if any one should treat her so.

Zell had scarcely more than enough to pay her way to New York. It seemed that people ought to stretch out their hands to s.h.i.+eld her, but they only jostled her in their haste. As she stood, with her bundle, in the ferry entrance on the New York side, undecided where to go, a man ran against her in his hurry.

”Get out of the way,” he said, irritably.

She moved out one side into the darkness, and with a pallid face said:

”Yes, it has come to this. I must 'get out of the way' of all decent people. There is the river on one side. There are the streets on the other. Which shall it be?”

”Oh! it was pitiful, Near a whole city full,”

that no hand was stretched to her aid.

She shuddered. ”I can't, I dare not die yet. It must be a little easier here than there, where he is.”

Her face became like stone. She went straight to a liquor saloon, and drank deep of that spirit that Shakespeare called ”devil,” in order to drown thought, fear, memory--every vestige of the woman.

Then--the depths of the gulf that Laura shrank from with a dread stronger than her love of life.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

EDITH BRINGS THE WANDERER HOME

Mrs. Lacey and Arden, at last, in the stress of their poverty, gave their consent that Rose should go to the city and try to find employment in a store as a shop-girl. Mrs. Glibe, her dressmaking friend, went with her, and though they could obtain no situation the first day, one of Mrs. Glibe's acquaintances directed Rose where she could find a respectable boarding-house, from which, as her home, she could continue her inquiries. Leaving her there, Mrs. Glibe returned.

Rose, with a hope and courage not easily dampened, continued her search the next day, and for several days following. The fall trade had not fairly commenced, and there seemed no demand for more help.

She had thirty dollars with which to start life, but a week of idleness took seven of this.

At last her fine appearance and sprightly manner induced the proprietor of a large establishment to put her in the place of a girl discharged that day, with the wages of six dollars a week.

”We give but three or four, as a general thing, to beginners,” he said.

Rose was grateful for the place, and yet almost dismayed at the prospect before her. How could she live on six dollars? The bright-colored dreams of city life were fast melting away before the hard, and in some instances revolting, facts of her experience. She could have obtained situations in two or three instances at better wages, if she had a.s.sented to conditions that sent her hastily into the street with burning blushes and indignant tears. She knew the great city was full of wickedness, but this rude contact with it appalled her.

After finding what she had to live on, she exchanged her somewhat comfortable room, where she could have a fire, for a cold, cheerless attic closet in the same house. ”As I learn the business, they will give more,” she thought, and the idea of going home penniless, to be laughed at by Mrs. Glibe, Miss Klip, and others was almost as bitter a prospect to her proud spirit as being a burden to her impoverished family, and she resolved to submit to every hards.h.i.+p rather than do it. By taking the attic room she reduced her board to five dollars a week.

”You can't get it for less, unless you go to a very common sort of a place,” said her landlady. ”My house is respectable, and people must pay a little for that.”

In view of this fact, Rose determined to stay, if possible, for she was realizing more every day how unsheltered and tempted she was.