She was now reduced to an income below what life can be decently maintained upon--the life of a city-dweller with normal tastes for cleanliness and healthfulness.She proceeded without delay to put her invaluable education into use.She must fill her mind with the present and with the future.She must not glance back.She must ignore her wounds--their aches, their clamorous throbs.She took off her clothes, as soon as Mrs.Tucker left her alone, brushed them and hung them up, put on the thin wrapper she had brought in her bag.The fierce heat of the little packing-case of a room became less unendurable; also, she was saving the clothes from useless wear.She sat down at the table and with pencil and paper planned her budget.
Of the ten dollars a week, three dollars and thirty cents must be subtracted for rent--for shelter.This left six dollars and seventy cents for the other two necessaries, food and clothing--there must be no incidental expenses since there was no money to meet them.She could not afford to provide for carfare on stormy days; a rain coat, overshoes and umbrella, more expensive at the outset, were incomparably cheaper in the long run.Her washing and ironing she would of course do for herself in the evenings and on Sundays.Of the two items which the six dollars and seventy cents must cover, food came first in importance.How little could she live on?
That stifling hot room! She was as wet as if she had come undried from a bath.She had thought she could never feel anything but love for the sun of her City of the Sun.But this undreamed-of heat--like the cruel caresses of a too impetuous lover--How little could she live on?"
Dividing her total of six dollars and seventy cents by seven, she found that she had ninety-five cents a day.She would soon have to buy clothes, however scrupulous care she might take of those she possessed.It was modest indeed to estimate fifteen dollars for clothes before October.That meant she must save fifteen dollars in the remaining three weeks of June, in July, August and September--in one hundred and ten days.She must save about fifteen cents a day.And out of that she must buy soap and tooth powder, outer and under clothes, perhaps a hat and a pair of shoes.Thus she could spend for food not more than eighty cents a day, as much less as was consistent with buying the best quality--for she had learned by bitter experience the ravages poor quality food makes in health and looks, had learned why girls of the working class go to pieces swiftly after eighteen.She must fight to keep health--sick she did not dare be.She must fight to keep looks--her figure was her income.
Eighty cents a day.The outlook was not so gloomy.A cup of cocoa in the morning--made at home of the best cocoa, the kind that did not overheat the blood and disorder the skin--it would cost her less than ten cents.She would carry lunch with her to the store.In the evening she would cook a chop or something of that kind on the gas stove she would buy.Some days she would be able to save twenty or even twenty-five cents toward clothing and the like.Whatever else happened, she was resolved never again to sink to dirt and rags.Never again!--never! She had passed through that experience once without loss of self-respect only because it was by way of education.To go through it again would be yielding ground in the fight--the fight for a destiny worth while which some latent but mighty instinct within her never permitted her to forget.
She sat at the table, with the shutters closed against the fiery light of the summer afternoon sun.That hideous unacceptable heat! With eyelids drooped--deep and dark were the circles round them--she listened to the roar of the city, a savage sound like the clamor of a multitude of famished wild beasts.A city like the City of Destruction in "Pilgrim's Progress"--a city where of all the millions, but a few thousands were moving toward or keeping in the sunlight of civilization.The rest, the swarms of the cheap boarding houses, cheap lodging houses, tenements--these myriads were squirming in darkness and squalor, ignorant and never to be less ignorant, ill fed and never to be better fed, clothed in pitiful absurd rags or shoddy vulgar attempts at finery, and never to be better clothed.She would not be of those! She would struggle on, would sink only to mount.She would work;she would try to do as nearly right as she could.And in the end she must triumph.She would get at least a good part of what her soul craved, of what her mind craved, of what her heart craved.
The heat of this tenement room! The heat to which poverty was exposed naked and bound! Would not anyone be justified in doing anything--yes, _anything_--to escape from this fiend?
