d a tooth-brush, like a perambulating drug-store
toilet-counter, down a boarding-house hall to that modified hall
bedroom with a tin tub which his doctor-landlord had called a
bath-room. Pictures, it must be admitted, give a room an air; pleasant
it is to sit in large chairs by fireplaces and feel yourself a landed
gentleman. But nothing filled Carl with a more delicate--and truly
spiritual--satisfaction than having a porcelain tub, plenty of hot
water, and the privilege of leaving his shaving-brush in the Ericson
bath-room with a fair certainty of finding it there when he wanted to
shave in a hurry.

But, careless of surroundings or not, Carl was stirred when on their
return from honeymooning in the Adirondacks he carried Ruth over the
threshold and they stood together in the living-room of their home.

It was a room to live in and laugh in. The wood-work was
white-enameled; the walls covered with gray Japanese paper. There were
no portieres between living-room and dining-room and small hall, so
that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an
effect of spaciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned
apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-a-brac, yet the
rooms were not bare, but clean and trim and distinguished, with the
large davenport and the wing-chair, chintz-cushioned brown willow
chairs, and Ruth's upright piano, excellent mahogany, and a few good
rugs. There were only two or three vases, and they genuinely intended
for holding flowers, and there was a bare mantelpiece that rested the
eyes, over the fuzzily clean gas-log. The pictures were chosen because
they led the imagination on--etchings and color prints, largely by
unknown artists, like windows looking on delightful country. The
chairs assembled naturally in groups. The whole unit of three rooms
suggested people talking.... It was home, first and last, though it
was one cell in one layer of a seven-story building, on a street
walled in with such buildings, in a city which lined up more than
three hundred of such streets from its southern tip to its northern
limit along the Hudson, and threw in a couple of million people in
Brooklyn and the Bronx.

They lived in the Nineties, between Broadway and Riverside Drive; a
few blocks from the Winslow house in distance, but one generation away
in the matter of decoration. The apartment-house itself was
comparatively old-fashioned, with an intermittent elevator run by an
intermittent