a number of generations of
Alton citizens had been accomplished. For a considerable term of years
Clark's Field would not change in character unless a disturbance of
unexpected magnitude should wipe clean the ground for men to plan anew.

As I have said, Clark's Field was now an industrial slum, but its
character was not as bad as much else in the cities of men. There are
far worse places in London or New York or Chicago--even in such smaller
cities as Pittsburg and Liverpool--for filth, crowding, and gloom. Age
added to cheapness increases misery and squalor, and Clark's Field was
still an infant. Indeed, the promoters of Clark's Field were proud of
their achievement and advertised it as the last and most enlightened
example of wholesale, industrial housing. But as Archie felt about it,
the place was worse really than the more celebrated slums of older
cities in its pretentious cheapness, its dreary monotony and
colorlessness, its very respectability and smug tediousness. A life
dropped into its maze and growing up in it must be lost for good and
all--must become just another human ant crawling over Clark's Field,
with the habits and coloring of all the other human ants striving there
for life and happiness. Archie, perhaps, felt this cramped and deadening
atmosphere more keenly than Adelle, and he prided himself on his greater
sensitiveness. He thanked God that he had come from the broad sunny
vineyards of the Golden State, where life still touches the arcadian
age,--not from _this_, as his wife had! His two years of foreign
rambling had educated him into a prideful sense of American vulgarity
and hideousness of detail.

Adelle seemed wholly absorbed in the bricks and mortar laid upon old
Clark's Field. She did not speak. It would be impossible to say what she
was thinking of.... At last, as they emerged from another long stretch
of narrow street bordered on either side by high tenements that were
varied according to a machine pattern by different colored bricks,
Archie protested. He growled,--"Well, haven't you seen enough of this
sort of thing to last you awhile?"

Adelle gave the order to retrace their journey to the hotel. She looked
back into the dreary maze with her wide gray eyes, and now they were not
quite empty eyes as they had been in the probate courtroom. She looked
and looked as if she were seeing the past as well as the present, as if
she were trying to fathom what Judge Orcutt had meant. When the Fi