charges were frightful, and laces and an oil portrait or two. The
trousseau was helped from all sides, every week had its miracle;
and the hats, and the embroidered whiteness, and the smart street
suit and the adorable kitchen ginghams accumulated as if by magic.
Bert's mother sent delightfully monogrammed bed and table-linen,
almost weekly. Nancy said it was preposterous for poor people to
start in with such priceless possessions!

Among the happy necessities of the time was the finding of a
proper apartment. Nancy and Bert spent delightful Saturdays and
Sundays wandering in quest of it; beginning half-seriously in
February, when it seemed far too early to consider this detail,
and continuing with augmented earnestness through the three
succeeding months. Eventually they got both tired and discouraged,
and felt dashed in the very opening of their new life, but finally
the place was found, and they loved it instantly, and leased it
without delay. It was in a new apartment house, in East Eleventh
Street, four shiny and tiny rooms, on a fourth floor. Everything
was almost too compact and convenient, Nancy thought; the ice box,
gas stove, dumb-waiter, hanging light over the dining table,
clothes line, and garbage chute, were already in place. It left an
ambitious housekeeper small margin for original arrangement, but
of course it did save money and time. The building was of pretty
cream brick, clean and fresh, the street wide, and lined with
dignified old brownstone houses, and the location perfect. She
smothered a dream of wide old-fashioned rooms, quaintly furnished
in chintzes and white paint. They had found no such enchanting
places, except at exorbitant rents. Seventy-five dollars, or one
hundred dollars, were asked for the simplest of them, and the
plumbing facilities, and often the janitor service, were of the