There was a
shimmer of (what appeared to my inexperienced eyes as) costly
stuffs, a huge hat crowned the shadow itself, "topped by nodding
plumes," which seemed to account for the depleted condition of my
feather duster.
I found on inquiring of the janitor, that the dressy person I had
met, was the char-woman in street attire, and that a closet was set
aside in the building, for the special purpose of her morning and
evening transformations, which she underwent in the belief that her
social position in Avenue A would suffer, should she appear in the
streets wearing anything less costly than seal-skin and velvet or
such imitations of those expensive materials as her stipend would
permit.
I have as tenants of a small wooden house in Jersey City, a bank
clerk, his wife and their three daughters. He earns in the
neighborhood of fifteen hundred dollars a year. Their rent (with
which, by the way, they are always in arrears) is three hundred
dollars. I am favored spring and autumn by a visit from the ladies
of that family, in the hope (generally futile) of inducing me to do
some ornamental papering or painting in their residence, subjects
on which they have by experience found my agent to be
unapproachable. When those four women descend upon me, I am fairly
dazzled by the splendor of their attire, and lost in wonder as to
how the price of all that finery can have been squeezed out of the
twelve remaining hundreds of their income.
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