om the mouths of
debutantes and coal-stokers, out from the mouths of those who toil and
those who spin not. Drifting over the sea of housetops, up from the
steep-walled streets. The laugh of the glad, the taut laugh of the mad;
the lover's sigh, and the convict's sigh--and, beneath, like arpeggio
scales under a melody, the swiftly running gabble-gabble of life.

Della stirred on her cot, raised her arms, and yawned to the
faun-colored oblong of October sky; breathed in the stale air and salty
pungency of bad ventilation and the city's breakfast-bacon, and swung
herself out of bed.

So awoke Adriana, too, with her hair falling in a torrent over her
breasts and her languid limbs unfolding.

She shook her hair backward with the changeless gesture of women, held
her hands at arm's-length, and regarded them. They were whiter, and the
broken nails were shaping themselves into ovals. A callous ridge along
her forefinger, souvenir of a cistern which pumped reluctantly, was
disappearing.

She smiled to herself in the mirror, like the legendary people who have
eyes to see the grass grow must smile at the secret of each blade.

Then she slid into a high-necked, long-sleeved wrapper and bound the
whorl of her hair in a loose bun at her neck.

Mrs. Fallows's minimum-priced, minimum-sized hall bedroom speaks for its
nine-by-twelve "neatly furnished" self. The hall bedrooms of
Forty-fourth Street and Forty-fifth Street and Forty-_ad-infinitum_
Street are furnished in that same white-iron bed with the dented brass
knobs, light-oak, easy-payment dresser, wash-stand, and square table
with a too short fourth leg and shelf beneath for dust--and above the
dresser, slightly askew, a heart-rendering, art-rendering version of
"Narcissus at the Pool," or any of the well-worn incidents favorite to
mythology and lithographers.

But life, like love and the high cost of living and a good cigar, is
comparative. To Della, stretching her limbs to the morning, Mrs.
Fallows's carpeted fourth-floor back, painted furniture, and a light
that sprang into brilliancy at a tweak, was a sybarite's retreat,
eighteen hours removed from wash-day, and rising in the dark, black
mud-roads and a dirt-colored shanty that met the wind broadside and
trembled to its innards.

Two flights below her a mezzo-soprano struggled for high C; adjoining,
an early-morning-throated barytone leaned out of a doorway and called
for a fresh towel. Came three staccato raps at D