CHAPTER XXXII
Six weeks later, when the torrid summer heat was waning and September breezes had begun to cool the streets, the nights, at any rate, I found myself a reporter on the staff of the New York Times. My salary of $35 a week seemed incredible. It was like coming into a fortune, and its first effect was to make a miser of me. I had learned the value of the single cent; I found myself fearful of spending even that cent. I understood why people who pass suddenly from want to affluence become stingy, complaining always of being hard-up. I determined to save. I opened an account in a Savings Bank against another rainy day. This trait, acquired in my unhappy New York period, remains in me still, I notice. Never have I known from that time to this what it means to be comfortably off, free from financial anxiety for more than a month or two ahead, yet each time an extra bit of money comes in, I am aware of the instinct to be extremely, unnecessarily careful of each penny. The less I have, the more reckless I feel about spending it, and vice versa.
Those six weeks, however, before Muldoon sent for me, proved the most painful and unhappy of all my New York days. There was something desperate about them; I reached bottom. It was the darkest period before the dawn, though I had no certainty that the dawn was breaking. My income from the eau de Cologne business was ended, my free-lance work struck a bad streak, the artists were still out of town, the studios consequently empty; my violin pupil had gone to Boston. It was during this August that I slept in Central Park, and passed the night—for there was not much sleep about it—beneath the Bronx Park trees as well, though I had to walk all the long weary way to get there. It was, also, par excellence, the height of the dried-apple season. With the
