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
mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each. If it were not for the
marble halls, and the decorations, and the foolishly expensive finish,
the houses could be built round a court, and the flats could be shaped
something like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets--only lit
from the outside--and the rest of the floor thrown into two or three
large cheerful halls, where all the family life could go on, and society