her mind the glimpses she had had of
the wonderful lands from which they had come, to imagine their lives in
that earlier environment. Sometimes she wandered, alone or with Eda,
through the various quarters of the city. Each quarter had a flavour of
its own, a synthetic flavour belonging neither to the old nor to the new,
yet partaking of both: a difference in atmosphere to which Janet was
keenly sensitive. In the German quarter, to the north, one felt a sort of
ornamental bleakness--if the expression may be permitted: the tenements
here were clean and not too crowded, the scroll-work on their
superimposed porches, like that decorating the Turnverein and the stem
Lutheran Church, was eloquent of a Teutonic inheritance: The Belgians
were to the west, beyond the base-ball park and the car barns, their grey
houses scattered among new streets beside the scarred and frowning face
of Torrey's hill. Almost under the hill itself, which threatened to roll
down on it, and facing a bottomless, muddy street, was the quaint little
building giving the note of foreign thrift, of socialism and shrewdness,
of joie de vivre to the settlement, the Franco-Belgian co-operative
store, with its salle de reunion above and a stage for amateur
theatricals. Standing in the mud outside, Janet would gaze through the
tiny windows in the stucco wall at the baskets prepared for each
household laid in neat rows beside the counter; at the old man with the
watery blue eyes and lacing of red in his withered cheeks who spoke no
English, whose duty it was to distribute the baskets to the women and
children as they called.

Turning eastward again, one came to Dey Street, in the heart of Hampton,
where Hibernian Hall stood alone and grim, sole testimony of the departed
Hibernian glories of a district where the present Irish rulers of the
city had once lived and gossiped and fought in the days when the mill
bells had roused the boarding-house keepers at half past four of a winter
morning. Beside the hall was a corner lot, heaped high with hills of
ashes and rubbish like the vomitings of some filthy volcano; the
unsightliness of which was half concealed by huge signs announcing the
merits of chewing gums, tobaccos, and cereals. But why had the departure
of the Irish, the coming of the Syrians made Dey Street dark, narrow,
mysterious, oriental? changed the very aspect of its architecture? Was it
the coffee-houses? One of these, in front of which Janet liked to l