treeless little gardens where they hung, with lightsome avenues of
pinafores, and solemn-spreading foliage of stout Welsh flannel. Here
that absorbing passion for oranges (especially active when the fruit is
half ripe, and the weather is bitter cold), which distinguishes the
city English girl of the lower orders, flourished in its finest
development; and here, also, the poisonous fumes of the holyday
shop-boy's bad cigar told all resident nostrils when it was Sunday, as
plainly as the church bells could tell it to all resident ears. The one
permanent rarity in this neighborhood, on week days, was to discover a
male inhabitant in any part of it, between the hours of nine in the
morning and six in the evening; the one sorrowful sight which never
varied, was to see that every woman, even to the youngest, looked more
or less unhappy, often care-stricken, while youth was still in the
first bud; oftener child-stricken before maturity was yet in the full
bloom.

As for the great central portion of the suburb--or, in other words, the
locality of the moderate incomes--it reflected exactly the lives of
those who inhabited it, by presenting no distinctive character of its
own at all.

In one part, the better order of houses imitated as pompously as they
could, the architectural grandeur of the mansions owned by the large
incomes; in another, the worst order of houses respectably, but
narrowly, escaped a general resemblance to the brick boxes of the small
incomes. In some places, the "park" influences vindicated their
existence superbly in the persons of isolated ladies who, not having a
carriage to go out in for an airing, exhibited the next best thing, a
footman to walk behind them: and so got a pedestrian airing genteelly
in that way. In other places, the obtrusive spirit of the brick boxes