Two of the men were intent upon the girl who lay in her father’s lap. They were rivals for her favor, and both were trying to coax her away. When she at last put out her arms to one of them, he tossed her toward the ceiling with a shout of glee at his triumph over the other man.
After supper we all regathered in the sitting-room. None of the men, so far as I could see, went out for the evening. Some of them read the newspapers of the day, and four had presently started a game of “High, Low, Jack,” at the table, with the result that most of the others were soon gathered about the players in excited interest, watching the varying fortunes of the game and giving vent to their feelings in boisterous outbursts.
I sat beside the fire talking to Mr. Schulz. There was inexpressible satisfaction in the feeling of _raison d’être_ which one had in being a worker with a steady job once more and a decent place in which to live. A boarding-house is not a synonym for home, and yet it may stir the domestic instincts deeply in the contrasts which it offers with the homeless life of the streets. The unquestioning hospitality with which I had been accepted as a guest was in keeping with the best of my experience so far. There was no suggestion of my paying anything in advance, though I had no security to offer beyond the fact that I was regularly employed in the factory and my promise to pay promptly out of the first instalment of my wages.
Mrs. Schulz had offered me board and lodging at four dollars a week, or at four dollars and a quarter if I wished a room to myself. It was the last bargain with which I closed when I was shown the only vacant room. It opened from the passage near the head of the landing and was perhaps seven feet by six. A single bed filled most of its area, and the rest was crowded with a chair and a small stand which supported an oil-lamp under a mirror on the wall. Some nails driven into the door and along the wall beside it, served the purpose of a closet. Light and air entered by a window which opened only a foot or two from a side-wall of the next building.
Cheerless as the room was and far from clean, it yet had about it all the essentials of privacy, and at a little past eight o’clock I went to bed with almost the sense of luxury after a fortnight’s experience of station-houses and cheap lodgings.