sufficient to her. For many years she had cherished a desire to
live in the country, to have a hen-house and a garden; but this
longing had faded with age, leaving only in the breast of the
uncommunicative old woman a vague tenderness for plants and
animals. It was, perhaps, this tenderness which made her cling
so fervently to her view from her window, a view in which the
most optimistic eye would at first have failed to discover
anything admirable.

Mrs. Manstey, from her coign of vantage (a slightly projecting
bow-window where she nursed an ivy and a succession of
unwholesome-looking bulbs), looked out first upon the yard of her
own dwelling, of which, however, she could get but a restricted
glimpse. Still, her gaze took in the topmost boughs of the
ailanthus below her window, and she knew how early each year the
clump of dicentra strung its bending stalk with hearts of pink.

But of greater interest were the yards beyond. Being for the
most part attached to boarding-houses they were in a state of
chronic untidiness and fluttering, on certain days of the week,
with miscellaneous garments and frayed table-cloths. In spite of
this Mrs. Manstey found much to admire in the long vista which
she commanded. Some of the yards were, indeed, but stony wastes,
with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring
save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clothes-
lines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others,
the green ones, she loved. She had grown used to their disorder;
the broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer
annoyed her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the
pleasanter side of the prospect before her.