beside the basement window. In the old days the front basement had
been the housemaids' sitting room with a channel-coal fire glowing in
the grate and a tidy white cloth on the table and neat rows of
geraniums in the windows--a cheery sort of place. Not at all like this
stuffy, overcrowded, ill ventilated place with the two silent shirt-
sleeved men humped over steaming ironing boards and with a dozen more
clattering away at noisy sewing machines.

A grizzled man scowled at her through thick glasses.

"Vell," he rasped, "Vat do you vant, madam?"

"I want to stay here."

"You vant to rent a room? I calls mine missus--" he called stridently,
"I think she gotta room for three dollars, I don' know--"

From the doorway of the once shining and immaculate kitchen a frowsy
head protruded, "Four we should get," whined a nasal voice "it is only
that it is on the top floor that we can make it so cheap--"

"This," announced Felicia to the slatternly woman "--is my house. How
dare you let it get so dirty!"

Her rising anger swept into her heart like a reviving fire. She
thought of Zeb, mouthing his scorn of the "dirty filthy heathen," she
thought of Mademoiselle D'Ormy scolding a housemaid who left so much
as a speck of dust on the hall balustrades, she did not see the
grinning woman gesturing to her husband, touching her forehead to
indicate Felicia's lack of wits.