anything comparable to it, and the country never. He said that if life
appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that
neighborhood he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions,
its alleviations, for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance
somewhere.

But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place? It could
not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere:
with a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe this as he looked
round on the abounding evidences of misery, and guiltily remembered his
neglect of his old friend. Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging
in some decenter part of the town; and, in fact, there was some
amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he
turned into from Mott.

A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he
pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell-knob, from which a yard of
rusty crape dangled. But it was not Lindau who was dead, for the woman
said he was at home, and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark
flights of stairs that led to his tenement. It was quite at the top of
the house, and when March obeyed the German-English "Komm!" that followed
his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was
scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove. The place
was bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial
air. On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it, which
seemed also to be a cobbler's shop: on the right, through a door that
stood ajar, came the German-English voice again, saying this time,
"Hier!"