d through the day. She was too tired to care
for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herself
with a cry that roused him, too. It was something about the children at
first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling asleep, and then
it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sections
growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrous
articulate was quite luminous again. She shuddered at the vague
description she was able to give; but he asked, "Did it offer to bite
you?"

"No. That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth."

March laughed. "Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York
flat--seven rooms and a bath."

"I really believe it was," she consented, recognizing an architectural
resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work
before them.

IX.

Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and
they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements,
and by reverting to agents. Some of these induced them to consider the
idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkerson
by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the
qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as
they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted
herself. They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar
apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing
to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were
of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated
rooms. They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as
they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.

They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the
perspective than an L road. The fire-escapes, with their light iron
balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the
roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's heads
seemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which flights of
high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers' shops
abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and
sausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in proportion
to the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined the
sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; t