"No; we've no time to waste. I've got a place near Third Avenue, on a
nice cross street, and I want him to take us there." It proved that she
had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their
coupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot. It came to
nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the
tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and
the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it. She lost all
patience with them.

"Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it," said her husband,
when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian
home. "But I'm not so sure that we are, either. I've been thinking about
that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged--in a
coupe--through that tenement-house street. Of course, no child born and
brought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home. But
that's because those poor people can't give character to their
habitations. They have to take what they can get. But people like
us--that is, of our means--do give character to the average flat. It's
made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it's made for
social show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby in a flat! It's
a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood. The
flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life. It's made
to give artificial people a society basis on a little money--too much
money, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the building is put
into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds. I don't object to
the conveniences, but none of these flats has a living-room. They have
drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they have dining-rooms and
bedrooms; but they have no room where the family can all come together
and feel the sweetness of being a family. The bedrooms are black-holes