kage system, of an era of flats with
little storage space. She took in at a glance the blue lettered placard
announcing the current price of butterine, and walked around to the
other side of the store, on Holmes Street, where the beef and bacon
hung, where the sidewalk stands were filled, in the autumn, with
cranberries, apples, cabbages, and spinach.

With little outer complaint she had adapted herself to the constantly
lowering levels to which her husband had dropped, and if she hoped that
in Fillmore Street they had reached bottom, she did not say so. Her
unbetrayed regret was for the loss of what she would have called
"respectability"; and the giving up, long ago, in the little city which
had been their home, of the servant girl had been the first wrench.
Until they came to Hampton they had always lived in houses, and her
adaptation to a flat had been hard--a flat without a parlour. Hannah
Bumpus regarded a parlour as necessary to a respectable family as a
wedding ring to a virtuous woman. Janet and Lise would be growing up,
there would be young men, and no place to see them save the sidewalks.
The fear that haunted her came true, and she never was reconciled. The
two girls went to the public schools, and afterwards, inevitably, to
work, and it seemed to be a part of her punishment for the sins of her
forefathers that she had no more control over them than if they had been
boarders; while she looked on helplessly, they did what they pleased;
Janet, whom she never understood, was almost as much a source of
apprehension as Lise, who became part and parcel of all Hannah deemed
reprehensible in this new America which she refused to recognize and
acknowledge as her own country.

To send them through the public schools had been a struggle. Hannah used
to lie awake nights wondering what would happen if Edward became sick.
It worried her that they never saved any money: try as she would to cut
the expenses down, there was a limit of decency; New England thrift,
hitherto justly celebrated, was put to shame by that which the
foreigners displayed, and which would have delighted the souls of
gentlemen of the Manchester school. Every once in a while there rose up
before her fabulous instances of this thrift, of Italians and Jews who,
ignorant emigrants, had entered the mills only a few years before they,
the Bumpuses, had come to Hampton, and were now independent property
owners. Still rankling in Hannah's memory was a day when