s through
which it had formerly run were bristling with new houses in no sense
Victorian, and which were the first stirrings of a national sense of the
artistic. The old horse-cars with the clanging chains had disappeared,
and you could take an electric to within a block of the imposing grille
that surrounded the Dwyer grounds. Westward the star!

Fading fast was the glory of that bright new district on top of the
second hill from the river where Uncle Tom was a pioneer. Soot had
killed the pear trees, the apricots behind the lattice fence had
withered away; asphalt and soot were slowly sapping the vitality of the
maples on the sidewalk; and sometimes Uncle Tom's roses looked as though
they might advantageously be given a coat of paint, like those in Alice
in Wonderland. Honora should have lived in the Dwyers' mansion-people
who are capable of judging said so. People who saw her at the garden
party said she had the air of belonging in such surroundings much more
than Emily, whom even budding womanhood had not made beautiful. And
Eliphalet Hopper Dwyer, if his actions meant anything, would have
welcomed her to that house, or built her another twice as fine, had she
deigned to give him the least encouragement.

Cinderella! This was what she facetiously called herself one July
morning of that summer she was eighteen.

Cinderella in more senses than one, for never had the city seemed
more dirty or more deserted, or indeed, more stifling. Winter and its
festivities were a dream laid away in moth balls. Surely Cinderella's
life had held no greater contrasts! To this day the odour of matting
brings back to Honora the sense of closed shutters; of a stifling south
wind stirring their slats at noonday; the vision of Aunt Mary, cool and
placid in a cambric sacque, sewing by the window in the upper hall, and
the sound of fruit venders crying in the street, or of ragmen in the
alley--"Rags, bottles, old iron!" What memories of endless, burning,
lonely days come rushing back with those words!

When the sun had sufficiently heated the bricks of the surrounding
houses in order that he might not be forgotten during the night, he
slowly departed. If Honora took her book under the maple tree in the
yard, she was confronted with that hideous wooden sign "To Let" on the
Dwyer's iron fence opposite, and the grass behind it was unkempt and
overgrown with weeds. Aunt Mary took an unceasing and (to Honora's mind)
morbid interest in the futu