CHAPTER IV.

Marcella on her way home turned into a little street leading to a great
block of model dwellings, which rose on the right hand side and made
everything else, the mews entrance opposite, the lines of squalid shops
on either side, look particularly small and dirty. The sun was beating
fiercely down, and she was sick and tired.

As she entered the iron gate of the dwellings, and saw before her the
large asphalted court round which they ran--blazing heat on one side of
it, and on the other some children playing cricket against the wall with
chalk marks for wickets--she was seized with depression. The tall yet
mean buildings, the smell of dust and heat, the general impression of
packed and crowded humanity--these things, instead of offering her rest,
only continued and accented the sense of strain, called for more
endurance, more making the best of it.

But she found a tired smile for some of the children who ran up to her,
and then she climbed the stairs of the E. block, and opened the door of
her own tenement, number 10. In number 9 lived Minta Hurd and her
children, who had joined Marcella in London some two months before. In
sets 7 and 8, on either side of Marcella and the Hurds, lived two
widows, each with a family, who were mostly out charing during the day.

Marcella's Association allowed its District Nurses to live outside the
"home" of the district on certain conditions, which had been fulfilled
in Marcella's case by her settlement next door to her old friends in
these buildings which were inhabited by a very respectable though poor
class. Meanwhile the trustees of the buildings had allowed her to make a
temporary communication between her room and the Hurds, so that she
could either live her own solitary and independent life, or call for
their companionship, as she pleased.

As she shut her door behind her she found herself in a little passage or
entry. To the left was her bedroom. Straight in front of her was the
living room with a small close range in it, and behind it a little back
kitchen.

The living room was cheerful and even pretty. Her art-student's training
showed itself. The cheap blue and white paper, the couple of oak flap
tables from a broker's shop in Marchmont Street, the two or three cane
chairs with their bright chintz cushions, the Indian rug or two on the
varnished boards, the photographs and etchings on the walls, the books
on the tables--there was not one of these th