By one o'clock that afternoon she had shifted bag and baggage to a
stuffy and poorly furnished bedchamber in a crowded, noisy, and not
overclean theatrical hotel situated on a corner of Longacre Square.
This establishment consisted of an old and rambling structure of four
storeys, of which the street floor was given over to tradesmen. An
all-night drug-store held the corner shop, while other subdivisions were
occupied by a "tonsorial parlor," a dairy-lunch room in the favour of
many taxicab chauffeurs, a boot-blacking business, and a theatrical
hair-dresser's. Next door, off Broadway, stood one of those reticent
brown-stone residences with perennially shuttered windows and a
front-door to all appearances hermetically sealed, but negotiable, none
the less, to those whom fortune had favoured with the password and
sufficient money and witlessness to make them welcome with proprietors
of crooked gambling layouts. Across the street rose the side wall of a
theatre, decorated with an angular iron fire-escape.
The day was almost unseasonably warm, but the hour appointed when the
city should blossom out in awnings had not arrived. Joan's room was hot
with sunlight that mercilessly enhanced the shabbiness of all its
appointments, from the stained and threadbare carpet to the cheap bureau
with its mottled, dark mirror, and the scorched and blistered edges of
its top where cigarettes had been suffered to burn out, forgotten.
But when Joan had unpacked and disposed of her belongings, she went to
the window as she was, in a loose kimono generously open at the throat,
and stood there for a long time, contentedly looking out.
Taxicabs darted or stood with motors sonorously rumbling in the street
below. Round the corner, Longacre Square roared with the traffic of its
several lines of surface-cars and its unending procession of
motor-driven vehicles. The windows of the theatre across the way were
open, and through them drifted the clatter of a piano with the surge of
half a hundred feminine voices repeating over and over the burden of a
chorus--betraying the fact that a rehearsal was in progress. At one of
the open fire-escape exits lounged a youth in his shirt-sleeves, smoking
a cigarette, and conversing amiably with a young woman in a
stiffly-starched white shirtwaist, ankle-length skirt, and brazen hair:
principals, Joan surmised, waiting for their turn, when the chorus had
learned its business acceptably.
Nearer at hand, in the room to the right of Joan's, a woman with a good
voice was humming absently an aria from "La Tosca," while to the left
another woman was audible, her strained and nervous accents stuttering
on in an endless monologue of abuse, evidently aimed at the head of a
husband who, if he had been "drinking again," retained at least wit
enough to attempt no sort of interruption or rejoinder.
Joan smiled in comprehension.
Breathing long and deep of tepid air flavoured strongly with dust and
the effluvia of dead cigars and cigarettes, she turned away from the
window, lifted her arms and spread them wide, luxuriously.
"Thank God!" she murmured with profound sincerity--"for a place you can
stretch in!"