elevator-service apartment-houses where home life is lived on the layer,
and the sins of the extension sole and the self-playing piano are
visited upon the neighbor below. Landed them four stories high and dry
in a strictly modern apartment of three dark, square bedrooms, a square
dining-room ventilated by an airshaft, and a square pocket of a kitchen
that looked out upon a zigzag of fire-escape. And last a square
front-room-de-resistance, with a bay of four windows overlooking a
distant segment of Hudson River, an imitation stucco mantelpiece, a
crystal chandelier, and an air of complete detachment from its curtailed
rear.

But even among the false creations of exterior architects and interior
decorators, home can find a way. Despite the square dining-room with
the stag-and-tree wall-paper design above the plate-rack and a gilded
radiator that hissed loudest at mealtime, when Simon Binswanger and his
family relaxed round their after-dinner table, the invisible cricket on
the visible hearth fell to whirring.

With the oldest gesture of the shod age Mrs. Binswanger dived into her
work-basket, withdrew with a sock, inserted her five fingers into the
foot, and fell to scanning it this way and that with a furrow between
her eyes.

"Ray, go in and tell your sister she should come out of her room and
stop that crying nonsense. I tell you it's easier we should all go to
Europe, even if we have to swim across, than every evening we should
have spoilt for us."

Ray Binswanger rose out of her shoulders, her eyes dazed with print,
then collapsed again to the pages of her book.