ons.

The second flight was harder to manage. The light from the narrow doorway
was shut off, and there were no windows. There might have been gas jets
upon every landing--Rose-Marie supposed that there were--but it was
mid-afternoon, and they had not yet been lighted. She groped her way up
the second flight, and the third, feeling carefully along each step with
her foot before she put her weight upon it.

On the fourth flight she paused for a moment to catch her breath. But she
realized, as she paused, that even breathing had to be done under
difficulties in this place. There was no ventilation of any sort, so far
as she could tell--all about her floated the odours of boiled cabbage,
and fried onions, and garlic. And there were other odours, too; the
indescribable smells of soiled clothing and soap-suds and greasy dishes.

But in Rose-Marie's mind, the odours--poignant though they were--took
second place to the sounds. Never, she told herself, had she imagined
that so many different sorts of noises could exist in the same place at
one and the same time. There were the cries and sobs of little children,
the moans of sickness, the thuds of falling furniture and the crashes of
breaking crockery. There were yells of rage, and--worst of all--bursts of
appalling profanity. Rose-Marie, standing there in the darkness of the
fourth flight, heard words that she had never expected to hear--phrases
of which she had never dreamed. She shuddered as she started up the fifth
flight, and when, at last, she stood in front of the Volsky flat, she
experienced almost a feeling of relief. At least she would be shut off,
in a moment, from those alien and terrible sounds--at least, in a moment,
she would be in a _home_.

To most of us--particularly if we have grown up in an atmosphere such as
had always sheltered Rose-Marie--the very sound of the word "home" brings
a certain sense of warmth and comfort. Home stands for shelter and
protection and love. "Be it ever so humble," the old song tells us, "be
it ever so humble ..."

And Rose-Marie, knocking timidly upon the Volsky door, expected to find a
home. She expected it to be humble in the truest sense of the word--to be
ragged and poverty-stricken and mean. And yet she could not feel that it
would be utterly divorced from the ideals she had always built around her
conception of the word. She expected it to be a home because a family
lived there together--a mother, and a father, and childr