Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1905-12-31
Am Experience i'm Bohemia and
How She Came 20 Leave 1t
By WINIFRE I'D BLACM

With some snow OF r1gntIul Sple1l-
dor, even in the noisy downtown
street. threw CLINT of glory across the forest-ke
spires of Grace Church and made the green lawn
before it smile out of the September dust like
pleasant memory a sad and downcast day.
The wholesale shops were closing and the street
was full of hurryng girls and sauntering men. 1t
was like living to look up Broadway at this hour.
Later when the hurrying girls all safe at
their suppers and the men had all gone to dinner,
and the street-sprinklers swishing past
sending up a smell of freshly wet earth, it was
lonely on lower Broadway, even for country
bred girl like Mary Clafn. When the women, who
had befriended Mary in the Idle Hour Theatrical
Company while it played its disconsolate and not
brilliantly successful way through the
season in the Lake George region, had brought
Mary to this lodging down in the clangor of the
wholesale district Mary had thought the place
really bohemian and therefore most interesting
and agreeable
She had climbed past the wholesale tailors on
the first floor past the cigar-makers the second
floor, past the box-1nakers on the third floor and
past the necktie factory the fourth floor to the
rooms in the peak of the garnet, and never thought
how she would like to climb those stairs at dusk
when all the various floors were locked and black,
and the dark staircase doomed before her, mys-
ferrous indeed, but still not SO lonely she, in
her hurried trepidation, sometimes wished it to
be.
There were six or seven squald rooms in the
by pale woman whose mind SO much occu-
pied with the strange doings of beings of another
world whose society she assiduously cultivated
by of table-tippings and other occult
sciences, that she had little time to think of the
small comforts of a vain and feeting world.
The little rooms, which always reminded Mary
of the chicken-coops at home, opened on a dark
square hall where broken and asthmatc stove
at the disposal of such dodgers wished to
prepare their food by its aid However, as the
more prosperous of the dodgers carried their own
o1-stoves from lodging to lodging and the less
prosperous were forced to do without warm food,
the asthmatic stove usually comfortably at
rest.
Its cheap and it's decent enough" said the
woman who had initiated Mary into the mysteries
of lodging house life, and saying this, twisting her
small and exceedingly bright eyes into kind of
bird-ike cunning of expression, she added And
that's all we want, amt it?
1t all that Mary wanted; but when the little
bird-hke woman, known in the playbi1ls as Miss
Belle Beauregard," signed engagement to play
the juvenile part in a number four Girl / Left
Behind Me" company and flew away sparrow-like
she left Mary lonely and tri1e dismayed, despite
her one small seasons experience a real actress
and her desperate determination to lead what her
Aunt Caroline the only one who had encouraged
her to leave home, called the Broader Life"
There times when the Broader Life"
seemed wee bit tiresome and even not so
broad Mary had hoped, after ALL and she fatered
a little in spite of her high courage There were
times, for instance, when the dramatic agents upon
whom she relied for engagement seemed to have
forgotten her existence and when the only person
who did remember her the 1andlady-and her
memory came down from the spirit world only on
rent-day
Oh yes, and Tom! Tom never forgot Mary
sometimes wished he would forget little when
he wrote his long matter-of-fact letters detailing
his progress in business and describing the new