they could not stand New York. She ended by telling him that it was too
bad to make her comfort him in a trial that was really so much more a
trial to her. She had to support him in a last access of despair on their
way to the Albany depot the morning they started to New York; but when
the final details had been dealt with, the tickets bought, the trunks
checked, and the handbags hung up in their car, and the future had massed
itself again at a safe distance and was seven hours and two hundred miles
away, his spirits began to rise and hers to sink. He would have been
willing to celebrate the taste, the domestic refinement, of the ladies'
waiting-room in the depot, where they had spent a quarter of an hour
before the train started. He said he did not believe there was another
station in the world where mahogany rocking-chairs were provided; that
the dull-red warmth of the walls was as cozy as an evening lamp, and that
he always hoped to see a fire kindled on that vast hearth and under that
aesthetic mantel, but he supposed now he never should. He said it was all
very different from that tunnel, the old Albany depot, where they had
waited the morning they went to New York when they were starting on their
wedding journey.

"The morning, Basil!" cried his wife. "We went at night; and we were
going to take the boat, but it stormed so!" She gave him a glance of such
reproach that he could not answer anything, and now she asked him whether
he supposed their cook and second girl would be contented with one of
those dark holes where they put girls to sleep in New York flats, and
what she should do if Margaret, especially, left her. He ventured to
suggest that Margaret would probably like the city; but, if she left,
there were plenty of other girls to be had in New York. She replied that
there were none she could trust, and that she knew Margaret would not
stay. He asked her why she took her, then--why she did not give her up at
once; and she answered that it would be inhuman to give her up just in