Page:Girls of Central High on the Stage.djvu/19



spite of the bright lights illuminating the windows of the M. O. R. house—and many other larger and finer houses at that end of Whiffle Street—outside it was dark and dreary enough. Especially was this so at the "poverty-stricken end," as Josephine Morse called her section of the street. Jess and her widowed mother lived on the fringe of the wealthy Hill district, where Whiffle Street develops an elbow, suddenly becomes narrow, and debouches upon Market Street.

It was raining, too. Not an honest, splashing downpour, but a drizzling, half-hearted rain that drifted about the streets as though ashamed of itself, leaving a deposit of slime on all the crosswalks, and making the corner street-lamps weep great tears. The gas-lamps, too, seemed in a fog and struggled feebly against the blackness of the evening.

Under a huge umbrella which snuffed her al-