enter into new combinations representing, to an eye
craving harmony, the last word of a chaos, of a mental indigestion, of a
colour scheme crying aloud to heaven for retribution. Standing alone and
bare amidst its truck gardens, hideous, extreme, though typical of the
entire settlement, composed of fragments ripped from once-appropriate
settings, is a house with a tiny body painted strawberry-red, with
scroll-work shutters a tender green; surmounting the structure and almost
equalling it in size is a sky-blue cupola, once the white crown of the
Sutter mansion, the pride of old Hampton. The walls of this dwelling were
wrested from the sides of Mackey's Tavern, while the shutters for many
years adorned the parsonage of the old First Church. Similarly, in
Hampton and in Fillmore Street, lived in enforced neighbourliness human
fragments once having their places in crystallized communities where
existence had been regarded as solved. Here there was but one order,--if
such it may be called,--one relationship, direct, or indirect, one
necessity claiming them all--the mills.

Like the boards forming the walls of the shacks at Glendale, these human
planks torn from an earlier social structure were likewise warped, which
is to say they were dominated by obsessions. Edward's was the Bumpus
family; and Chris Auermann, who lived in the flat below, was convinced
that the history of mankind is a deplorable record of havoc caused by
women. Perhaps he was right, but the conviction was none the less an
obsession. He came from a little village near Wittenburg that has
scarcely changed since Luther's time. Like most residents of Hampton who
did not work in the mills, he ministered to those who did, or to those
who sold merchandise to the workers, cutting their hair in his barber
shop on Faber Street.

The Bumpuses, save Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride,
preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood
by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled
a certain enforced contact. When the heat in the little dining-room grew
unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the front steps shared in
common with the household of the barber. It is true that the barber's
wife was a mild hausfrau who had little to say, and that their lodgers,
two young Germans who worked in the mills, spent most of their evenings
at a bowling club; but Auermann himself, exhaling a strong odour of bay