and look at the furnaces; she exacted from him a rigid
inquest of the plumbing. She followed him into one of the cellars by the
fitful glare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyed a moment
in which the anomaly of their presence there on that errand, so remote
from all the facts of their long-established life in Boston, realized
itself for them.

"Think how easily we might have been murdered and nobody been any the
wiser!" she said when they were comfortably outdoors again.

"Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity,
supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting," he suggested.
She fell in with the notion. "I'm beginning to feel crazy. But I don't
want you to lose your head, Basil. And I don't want you to sentimentalize
any of the things you see in New York. I think you were disposed to do it
in that street we drove through. I don't believe there's any real
suffering--not real suffering--among those people; that is, it would be
suffering from our point of view, but they've been used to it all their
lives, and they don't feel their' discomfort so much."

"Of course, I understand that, and I don't propose to sentimentalize
them. I think when people get used to a bad state of things they had
better stick to it; in fact, they don't usually like a better state so
well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind."

She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue,
exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar,
toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home to
their hotel. "Now to-night we will go to the theatre," she said, "and get
this whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh for a
new start in the morning." Suddenly she clutched his arm. "Why, did you
see that man?" and she signed with her head toward a decently dressed
person who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as if to
examine it, and half halting at times.

"No. What?"

"Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and cram
it into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished. And look! he's
actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!"

This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken nails
of a workman was doing-like a hungry dog. They kept up with him, in the
fascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned down the
side street still searching the gutter.

They