ses and bakeries are sullenly held back by the
gas-house district and three-story houses of muddy halls and furtive
people who have lost ambition. The genus "furnished housekeeping room"
is a filthy box with a stove, a table, a bed, a few seats, many
cockroaches, and from one to twenty people, all thrown in and shaken up,
like a grab-bag. Here in this world of tired and beaten slinkers the
Innocents, with their fresh faces and kindly eyes, excitedly made
themselves another home.

With carbolic acid and soap Mother cleaned away much of the smell of
former inhabitants, while Father propped up the rusty stove with a
couple of bricks, and covered the drably patternless wall-paper with
pictures cut from old magazines, which he bought at two for five cents
on Fourteenth Street. One of them was a chromo of a child playing with
kittens, which reminded him of the picture they had had in more
prosperous days. Mother furiously polished the battered knives and
forks, and arranged the chipped china on shelves covered with fresh pink
scalloped paper. When she was away Father secretly pursued the vulgar
but socially conscious sport of killing cockroaches with a slipper.

As the Applebys passed along the hopeless streets, past shops lighted
with single gas-jets, or through halls where suspicious women in frowsy
wrappers peered at them, they were silent. But in their one room they
were hopeful again, and they celebrated its redecoration with music
energetically performed by Father on the mouth-organ. Also they ventured
to go out to dinner, in a real restaurant of the great city, their
city. On Fourteenth Street was a noble inn where the menu was printed in
English and Hungarian, where for thirty-five cents each they had soup
and goulash and coffee and pudding in three colors, chloroformed beets
and vast, pale, uneasy-looking pickles, electric lights in red globes
and a tinseled ceiling hung with artificial flowers, the music of a
violin and the sight of eager city faces.

"I'm as excited as a boy with his first pair of red-top boots," declared
Father. "Pretty fine to see people again, heh? And pretty soon we'll be
dining at the Wal-dorf-As-torya, heh?"

"How you do run on!" said Mother, mechanically, placid dreaminess in her
face as she listened to the violin that like a river bore the flotsam of
Hungarian and Jewish voices.

Alone, jobless, yet they were so recklessly happy that they went to a
ten-cent movie and watched the extrem