read about ten-cent lodging-houses, where human beings were herded like
cattle, hovered over her.

Growing wise with experience, she discovered that she could get a black
sateen shirt-waist for fifty cents. Rubbers and a cotton umbrella took
another dollar and a half. She must save at least a dollar to send back
the suit-case by express.

A bargain-table of odds and ends of woollen jackets, golf vests, and old
fashioned blouse sweaters, selling off at a dollar apiece, solved the
problem of a wrap. She selected a dark blouse, of an ugly, purply blue,
but thick and warm. Then with her precious packages she asked a
pleasant-faced saleswoman if there were any place near where she could
slip on a walking skirt she had just bought to save her other skirt from
the muddy streets. She was ushered into a little fitting-room near by. It
was only about four feet square, with one chair and a tiny table, but it
looked like a palace to the girl in her need, and as she fastened the door
and looked at the bare painted walls that reached but a foot or so above
her head and had no ceiling, she wished with all her heart that such a
refuge as this might be her own somewhere in the great, wide, fearful
world.

Rapidly she slipped off her fine, silk-lined cloth garments, and put on
the stiff sateen waist and the coarse black skirt. Then she surveyed
herself, and was not ill pleased. There was a striking lack of collar and
belt. She sought out a black necktie and pinned it about her waist, and
then, with a protesting frown, she deliberately tore a strip from the edge
of one of the fine hem-stitched handkerchiefs, and folded it in about her
neck in a turn-over collar. The result was quite startling and unfamiliar.
The gown, the hair, the hat, and the neat collar gave her the look of a