would stand together for a moment wrapped
in gloomy reflection, and then part.

The kitchen and nurse maids felt on the subject, too.

"If Carl Carlsen would only smile," they used to exclaim in sibilant
whispers, as they passed on the way to the laundry. "If he'd come in an'
joke while we wus washin'!"

Only Kara Johnson never said anything on the subject because she knew
why Carlsen didn't smile, and was sorry for it, and would have made it
all right--if it hadn't been for Lars Larsen.

Dear, dear, but this is a digression from the subject of the Lease.
That terrible document was held over the heads of the children as the
Herodian pronunciamento concerning small boys was over the heads of the
Israelites.

It was in the Lease not to run--not to jump--not to yell. It was in the
Lease not to sing in the halls, not to call from story to story, not to
slide down the banisters. And there were blocks of banisters so smooth
and wide and beautiful that the attraction between them and the seats
of the little boy's trousers was like the attraction of a magnet for a
nail. Yet not a leg, crooked or straight, fat or thin, was ever to be
thrown over these polished surfaces!

It was in the Lease, too, that no peddler or agent, or suspicious
stranger was to enter the Santa Maria, neither by the front door nor the
back. The janitor stood in his uniform at the rear, and the lackey in
his uniform at the front, to prevent any such intrusion upon the privacy
of the aristocratic Santa Marias. The lackey, who politely directed
people, and summoned elevators, and whistled up tubes and rang bells,
thus conducting the complex social life of those favoured apartments,
was not one to make a mistake, and admit any person not calculated to
ornament the front parlours of the flatters.

It was this that worried the children.

For how could such a dear, disorderly, democratic rascal as the
children's saint ever hope to gain a pass to that exclusive entrance and
get up to the rooms of the flat children?

"You can see for yourself," said Ernest, who lived on the first floor,
to Roderick who lived on the fourth, "that if Santa Claus can't get up
the front stairs, and can't get up the back stairs, that all he can
do is to come down the chimney. And he can't come down the chimney--at
least, he can't get out of the fireplace."

"Why not?" asked Roderick, who was busy with an "all-day sucker" and not
inclined to take a gloomy view of anything.