twenty-five-foot brownstone house. And within, also, it was of a
familiar New York type. It was the home of the rich, vain
ignoramus who has not taste enough to know that those to whom he
has trusted for taste have shockingly betrayed him. Ganser had
begun as a teamster for a brewery and had grown rapidly rich late
in life. He happened to be elected president of a big Verein and
so had got the notion that he was a person of importance and
attainments beyond his fellows. Too coarse and narrow and
ignorant to appreciate the elevated ideals of democracy, he
reverted to the European vulgarities of rank and show. He
decided that he owed it to himself and his family to live in the
estate of ``high folks.'' He bought a house in what was for him
an ultra-fashionable quarter, and called for bids to furnish it
in the latest style. The results were even more regardless of
taste than of expense--carpets that fought with curtains,
pictures that quarreled with their frames and with the walls,
upholstery so bellicose that it seemed perilous to sit upon.

But Feuerstein was as impressed as the Gansers had been the first
time they beheld the gorgeousness of their palace. He looked
about with a proprietary sense-- ``I'll marry this little
idiot,'' he said to himself. ``Maybe my nest won't be downy, and
maybe I won't lie at my ease in it!''

He met Mrs. Ganser and had the opportunity to see just what Lena
would look and be twenty years thence. Mrs. Ganser moved with
great reluctance and difficulty. She did not speak unless forced
and then her voice seemed to have felt its way up feebly through
a long and painfully narrow passage, emerging thin, low and
fainting. When she sat--or, rather, AS she sat, for she was