"This and the parlors count three, and the kitchen here is the fourth
room of the eight," she said, and as she spoke she pushed open the door
of a small room, blazing with light and dense with the fumes of the
dinner and the dish-washing which was now going on in a closet opening
out of the kitchen.

She showed me the set range, at one side, and the refrigerator in an
alcove, which she said went with the flat, and, "Lena," she said to the
cook, "this is the Altrurian gentleman I was telling you about, and I
want him to see your kitchen. Can I take him into your room?"

The cook said, "Oh yes, ma'am," and she gave me a good stare, while Mrs.
Makely went to the kitchen window and made me observe that it let in the
outside air, though the court that it opened into was so dark that one
had to keep the electrics going in the kitchen night and day. "Of course,
it's an expense," she said, as she closed the kitchen door after us. She
added, in a low, rapid tone, "You must excuse my introducing the cook.
She has read all about you in the papers--you didn't know, I suppose,
that there were reporters that day of your delightful talk in the
mountains, but I had them--and she was wild, when she heard you were
coming, and made me promise to let her have a sight of you somehow. She
says she wants to go and live in Altruria, and if you would like to take
home a cook, or a servant of any kind, you wouldn't have much trouble.
Now here," she ran on, without a moment's pause, while she flung open
another door, "is what you won't find in every apartment-house, even very
good ones, and that's a back elevator. Sometimes there are only stairs,
and they make the poor things climb the whole way up from the basement,
when they come in, and all your marketing has to be brought up that way,
too; sometimes they send it up on a kind of dumb-waiter, in the cheap
places, and you give your orders to the market-men down below through a