Sometimes, departing from the lists furnished me, I stumbled upon wonderful places where "cozy corners" greatly prevailed, and where the landladies wore trailing negligées of soiled pink or blue instead of the tight-fitting black uniform of the other houses. Whenever such a meeting inadvertently occurred, the gorgeous landlady and I were always as eager as civility would permit to see the last of each other.
Then there were other places--airy, clean and bright, with parlors guiltless of any suggestion of the folding bed, with graceful furnishings, efficient servants, cheerful landladies. But these were always either "full"--I don't wonder--or what they had left was far beyond my humble means.
I wandered through the unhomelike splendors of the woman's hotel, by and by. Here at least there would be no question of boarding house parlor etiquette--there were successions of charming, big, airy, handsomely fitted-out parlors; there were tea rooms, there were libraries and writing rooms. The bedrooms themselves--simple, sunny, clean--- were charming, with their chintz-frilled cots and their substantially made wooden pieces. Here I could live, by a pretty rigid system of economy, for nine dollars a week--four for my tiny bedroom, five for my breakfasts and dinners. I would have to share the sparkling white and nickel bathroom with only two others.
I was not one of those haughty souls who revolted at the rule forbidding masculine callers above the parlor floors; in the first place, I had not been long enough in New York to know that young women ever did receive callers save in drawing rooms of some description, and in the second, I didn't expect any callers for a long time. Once Robert Matthews saw me safely settled, I knew that his neighborly kindness would dwindle; and he was my only possible visitor at present. No, one might be very comfortable at the woman's hotel, I was sure--if one could overcome a prejudice against being one of a mass. I had been long enough at the Margaret Louisa to know that I abhorred whatever savored of an institution, and all women in bulk, so to speak. Even a dingy hall room in a dreary boarding house, with the fumes of old dinners wrought into the very web of the carpets, and a lackadaisically suspicious landlady, seemed better and more homelike to me than the comforts and luxuries of a big feminized institution. At least, in the boarding house, one could be an individual, something more than a number.