lived, she told me, in Marlborough Road, Brooklyn, and after her husband's death, probably wishing to conserve all of his monetary bequests, she and her brother had decided they would defray their summer expenses by keeping a rooming-house that season. That accounted for the rather unusually nice furniture in her house. I think my being alone excited her curiosity, but I was so perfectly well, and my physical soundness coupled with a growing sense of ease as I lived myself day by day into the plausibility of my "story" and my situation, made it a pleasure for me to witness evidences of this curiosity and deliberately refuse to satisfy them.
I wrote Mr. Harding, telling him all about Mrs. Tonneson, my feelings concerning her, and how she did attempt to take sort of a motherly interest in me, and his reply brought forth the advice that she might prove a valuable person to "hang onto," and that I should simply "pay my way" and stay out-of-doors away from her and everybody else who might be interested in knowing more about me.
During the latter part of the summer Mrs. Tonnesen had also as roomers a Jewess and her husband. The woman was a nurse and her husband a musician. She had charge of a Brooklyn hospital and it seemed to me an excellent idea to accept her proffered invitation to visit her in the hospital after she returned there with a view to deciding whether such a place would be desirable for my approaching confinement.
I shall never forget that visit. I had luncheon with the nurse, whose name has slipped my memory. The food seemed to me to be half swimming in grease. I walked all over the place, and even submitted to an examination by the head doctor, who was, I thought, rough and uncouth and who informed me gruffly, when I complained that he really hurt me, that I would be "hurt harder than that when my baby came." A woman who had given birth to a child that morning lay apparently unconscious from the agony of her experience, and I went in and touched her to see if she really lived. The nurse took me into the baby ward where a dozen or more babies lay
