In the street below the narrow windows surface cars whirred to and fro and clanged their bells.  In front of the windows, and strangely, terribly near to the six-inch-wide balconies, furnished with withered rubber plants, roared the “L” trains, jointed, many-eyed dragons chasing each other so fast that there seemed to be no pause between at any hour of the day or during most hours of the night.  Private life behind those windows was impossible unless you kept your blinds down.  If you forgot, or said wildly to yourself that you didn’t care, that you must breathe and see your own complexion by daylight at any cost, thousands of faces, one after the other, stared into yours.  You could almost touch them, and it was little or no consolation to reflect when they had seen you brushing your hair or fastening your blouse, that these travellers in trains would never hear your name or know who you were.

As for a bath—­but then the great, magnificent advantage of living at Mrs. McFarrell’s was the bathroom.  It was dark and small and smelled of the black beetles who lived happily around the hot-water pipes.  You were not expected to take more than one bath a week, and for that one bath towel was provided free.

“Oh, I thought you’d had your bath this week!” was the answer Win got on her second night, when mildly asking for a towel which had disappeared.  But if you were silly enough to pay thirty cents extra for putting water on your body every day, you could do so.  And, anyhow a bathroom was a splendid advertisement.  One lodger told another:  “The use of the bathroom is thrown in.”

That night, when Win had bathed and laid herself carefully down in the narrow bed which shook and groaned as if suffering from palsy, it seemed more impossible than ever to go to sleep.  Each new train that rumbled by was a giant, homing bee, her brain the hive for which it aimed.  Her hot head was crowded with thoughts, disturbing, fighting, struggling thoughts, yet the giant bee pushed the throng ruthlessly aside and darted in.  Each time it seemed impossible to bear it again.  She felt as if she had caterpillars in her spine and ants on her nerves.

Win thought about the superintendent, Mr. Meggison, and wondered again and again whether she would be discharged or whether he had merely “taken a fancy” to her looks and wished to see if she were flirtatiously inclined.  She knew now, from Sadie, that Meggison’s desire was to be a “gay dog,” though his courage did not always march with his ambition.

The red-haired girl, Sadie supposed, had perhaps come to the Hands armed with an introduction from some “lady friend.”  This theory would account for Meggison’s mysterious murmur of, “That’s different.”  What should she—­Win—­do if Father invited her to dine with him, as it seemed he did invite some of the girls?  Sadie said that if such a thing happened to her she would accept, because she wasn’t afraid of Father.  She “could scare him more than he could scare her,” and an extra hand might “get the push” if she refused a civil invitation.