"Don't say such a thing, dearest."

He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the
present, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far
as it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare of
flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let her.
She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing
such a thing; and they dragged through the day. She was too tired to care
for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herself
with a cry that roused him, too. It was something about the children at
first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling asleep, and then
it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sections
growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrous
articulate was quite luminous again. She shuddered at the vague
description she was able to give; but he asked, "Did it offer to bite
you?"

"No. That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth."

March laughed. "Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York
flat--seven rooms and a bath."

"I really believe it was," she consented, recognizing an architectural
resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work
before them.




IX.