city people live here. I ought perhaps to tell you that such a house is
fitted with every housekeeping convenience, and that there is hot and
cold water throughout, and gas everywhere. It has fireplaces in all the
rooms, where fires are often kept burning for pleasure; but it is really
heated from a furnace in the basement, through large pipes carried to the
different stories, and opening into them by some such registers as we
use. The separate houses sometimes have steam-heating, but not often.
They each have their drainage into the sewer of the street, and this is
trapped and trapped again, as in the houses of our old plutocratic
cities, to keep the poison of the sewer from getting into the houses.




VIII


You will be curious to know something concerning the cost of living in
such a house, and you may be sure that I did not fail to question Mrs.
Makely on this point. She was at once very volubly communicative; she
told me all she knew, and, as her husband said, a great deal more.

"Why, of course," she began, "you can spend all you have in New York, if
you like, and people do spend fortunes every year. But I suppose you mean
the average cost of living in a brown-stone house, in a good block, that
rents for $1800 or $2000 a year, with a family of three or four children,
and two servants. Well, what should you say, Dick?"

"Ten or twelve thousand a year--fifteen," answered her husband.