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She laughed aloud when she bumped her head, and getting out of and into her clothes was a fascinating exercise in contortion. She was entranced by the wash-room with its hot and cold water and its basin of apparent silver, whose contents did not have to be lifted and splashed into a slop-jar, but magically emptied themselves at the raising of a medallion.
"There's no trouble; you can find it by the stench." "Wardrobe?" "Two nails on the door to hang seven suits of clothes on if you've got them." "Bells?" "There aren't any." "What do you do when you want service?" "Shout. But it won't fetch anybody." "Suppose you want the chambermaid to empty the slopjar?" "There isn't any slop-jar. The hotels don't keep them.
It was already past the appointed hour for Mr. Cobb and his coach to be lumbering down the street. "The stage ought to be here," said Miranda, glancing nervously at the tall clock for the twentieth time. "I guess everything's done. I've tacked up two thick towels back of her washstand and put a mat under her slop-jar; but children are awful hard on furniture.
There was a dingy-looking oak bureau with a rather small but pretty good plate-glass mirror on it; a marble topped, black walnut wash-stand; a pitcher of the plainest and cheapest white ware standing in a bowl on top of it, and a highly ornate, hand-painted slop-jar the sole survivor, evidently, of a much prized set under the lee of it.
It was already past the appointed hour for Mr. Cobb and his coach to be lumbering down the street. "The stage ought to be here," said Miranda, glancing nervously at the tall clock for the twentieth time. "I guess everything 's done. I've tacked up two thick towels back of her washstand and put a mat under her slop-jar; but children are awful hard on furniture.
Then I dropped the vinaigrette in the slop-jar and jumped down from the wash-stand. Her high, old-fashioned bureau tempted me next. There were rows and rows of pins in a big blue pincushion, put in as evenly as if it had been done by a machine. I pulled them out, one by one, and dropped them down behind the bureau.
Details of its hideousness, that he hadn't been conscious of observing during the hours he had spent in it, came back to him, bitten out with acid clearness; the varnished top of the bureau mottled with water stains, the worn splintered floor, the horrible hard blue of the iron bed, the florid pattern on the hand-painted slop-jar. And that abominable room was where Rose was now!
Such an amount of good will and neighborly kindness also went into the mess, that I never could find the heart to refuse, but always received it with thanks, sipped it with hypocritical relish while he remained, and whipped it into the slop-jar the instant he departed, thereby gratifying him, securing one rousing laugh in the doziest hour of the night, and no one was the worse for the transaction but the pigs.
"My mistake," he apologized. She considered it promiscuous and cheap, and you know her aversion for cheapness. Then she obtained, after a few forays in and out of brownstone houses in West Forty-fifth Street, one of those hall bedrooms so familiar to human-interest stories the iron-bed, washstand, and slop-jar kind. There was a five-dollar advance required. That left her twenty dollars.
Red had popped out in her cheeks. There was voice in each breath moans that her throat would not hold. That night she slept in the kind of fifty-cent room the city offers its decent poor. A slit of a room with a black-iron bed and a damp mattress. A wash-stand gaunt with its gaunt mission. A slop-jar on a zinc mat. A caneless-bottom chair.
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