Beyond a doubt M'riar was in her element. She labored day and night.
Few tasks there were about the tiny three-room menage, save the actual
cooking, which she did not undertake and undertake with energy which
made up, largely, for her lack of skill. Herr Kreutzer, who had been
in doubt about the wisdom of engrafting her upon his little family
looked at her with amazement, sometimes lowering his flute, on which
he might be practicing, in the very middle of a bar, so that he might
better stare at her unbounded and unceasing physical activities. She
abandoned, as unworthy of her mistress, her old form of address and no
longer simply called her "Miss," but "Frow-_line_," after tutelage
from the small shop-woman who sold cheese to her in three-cent
packages.

But, ere much time had passed, the day arrived when Herr Kreutzer
feared to have her even buy so much of luxury as cheese in three-cent
packages. The little bag of money which had chinked so bravely on his
hip when he had first arrived in New York city scarcely chinked at
all, these days. Everything was so expensive in this new land they had
come to! Not only must he pay as much rent for a three-room tenement,
with one room almost dark and one quite windowless, as he had had to
pay, in London, for the comfortable floor which they had occupied in
Soho, but food cost twice as much, he woefully declared--and played
the "Miserere" on his flute. He would not go to Karrosch, or any of
the large, important orchestras; none of the small ones wished a
flutist. He learned to loathe the mere word "phonograph"--in so many
places did it form a clock-work substitute to do the work he longed to
do.

It was when want actually stared them in the face that he read an