qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as
they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted
herself. They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar
apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing
to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were
of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated
rooms. They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as
they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.

They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the
perspective than an L road. The fire-escapes, with their light iron
balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the
roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's heads
seemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which flights of
high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers' shops
abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and
sausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in proportion
to the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined the
sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades
stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the
street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the
children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly
blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard
zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abode of the
extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world,
transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing
conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to
those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.

The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic