faltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and the crumbled
brownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of the apartments
had been taken between two visits they made. Then the only combination
left open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the right and a
third-floor flat to the left.

Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the first
opportunity. In the mean time there were several flats which they thought
they could almost make do: notably one where they could get an extra
servant's room in the basement four flights down, and another where they
could get it in the roof five flights up. At the first the janitor was
respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of ironical
pessimism. When they trembled on the verge of taking his apartment, he
pointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor ceiling, and
gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should not agree to put in
shape unless they took the apartment for a term of years. The apartment
was unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that they wanted a
furnished apartment, and made their escape. This saved them in several
other extremities; but short of extremity they could not keep their
different requirements in mind, and were always about to decide without
regard to some one of them.

They went to several places twice without intending: once to that
old-fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered all
over the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and then
recognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the pathetic
widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board. They
stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that the
mother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she was
in New York studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by taking
boarders. Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded; and
they encouraged her to believe that it could only be a few days till the
rest of her scheme was realized.

"I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable there," March suggested
when they had got away. "Now if we were truly humane we would modify our
desires to meet their needs and end this sickening search, wouldn't we?"

"Yes, but we're not truly humane," his wife answered, "or at least not in
that sense. You know you hate boarding; and if we went there I should
have them on my sympathies the whole ti