rnaces; 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 walked on a few pa