When Mrs. Snawdor heard that Nance had quit work, she was furious. Who was Nance Molloy, she wanted to know, to go and stick up her nose at a glass factory? There wasn't a bloomin' thing the matter with Clarke's. _She'd_ begun in a factory an' look at her! What was Nance a-goin' to do? Run the streets with Birdie Smelts? It was bad enough, God knew, to have Snawdor settin' around like a tombstone, an' Fidy a-havin' a fit if you so much as looked at her, without havin' Nance eatin' 'em out of house an' home an' not bringin' in a copper cent. If she stayed at home, she'd have to do the work; that was all there was to it!
"Anybody'd think jobs happened around as regerlar as the rent man," she ended bitterly. "You'll see the day when you're glad enough to go back to the factory."
Before the month was over, Nance began to wonder if Mrs. Snawdor was right. With unabating zeal she tramped the streets, answering advertisements, applying at stores, visiting agencies. But despite the fact that she unblushingly recommended herself in the highest terms, nobody seemed to trust so young and inexperienced an applicant.
Meanwhile Birdie Smelts's thrilling prospect of joining her company at an early date threw other people's sordid possibilities into the shade. Every night she practised gymnastics and dance steps, and there being no room in the Smelts' flat, she got into the habit of coming up to Nance's room.
One of the conditions upon which Nance had been permitted to return to Calvary Alley, was that she should not sleep in the same bed with Fidy Yager, a condition which enraged Mrs. Snawdor more than all the rest.
"Annybody'd think Fidy's fits was ketchin'," she complained indignantly to Uncle Jed.
"That there front room of mine ain't doin' anybody no good," suggested Uncle Jed. "We might let Nance have that."
So to Nance's great joy she was given a big room all to herself. The slat bed, the iron wash-stand, the broken-legged chair, and the wavy mirror were the only articles that Mrs. Snawdor was willing to part with, but Uncle Jed donated a battered stove, which despite its rust-eaten top and sagging door, still proclaimed itself a "Little Jewel".
No bride, adorning her first abode, ever arranged her possessions with more enthusiasm than did Nance. She scrubbed the rough floor, washed the windows, and polished the "Little Jewel" until it shone. The first money she could save out of her factory earnings had gone to settle that four-year-old debt to Mr. Lavinski for the white slippers; the next went for bedclothes and cheese-cloth window curtains. Her ambition was no longer for the chintz hangings and gold-framed fruit pieces of Mrs. Purdy's cottage, but looked instead toward the immaculate and austere bedroom of Miss Stanley, with its "Melodonna" over the bed and a box of blooming plants on the window-sill.