ldn't care for the steam heat if--What is the rent?" he
broke off to ask the janitor.

"Nine hundred, sir."

March concluded to his wife, "If it were furnished."

"Why, of course! What could I have been thinking of? We're looking for a
furnished flat," she explained to the janitor, "and this was so pleasant
and homelike that I never thought whether it was furnished or not."

She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into the joke and chuckled
so amiably at her flattering oversight on the way down-stairs that she
said, as she pinched her husband's arm, "Now, if you don't give him a
quarter I'll never speak to you again, Basil!"

"I would have given half a dollar willingly to get you beyond his
glamour," said March, when they were safely on the pavement outside.
"If it hadn't been for my strength of character, you'd have taken an
unfurnished flat without heat and with no elevator, at nine hundred a
year, when you had just sworn me to steam heat, an elevator, furniture,
and eight hundred."

"Yes! How could I have lost my head so completely?" she said, with a
lenient amusement in her aberration which she was not always able to
feel in her husband's.

"The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, I'll tell him
the apartment doesn't suit at the threshold. It's the only way to manage
you, Isabel."

"It's true. I am in love with the whole race. I never saw one of them
that didn't have perfectly angelic manners. I think we shall all be
black in heaven--that is, black-souled."

"That isn't the usual theory," said March.

"Well, perhaps not," she assented. "Where are we going now? Oh yes, to
the Xenophon!"

She pulled him gayly along again, and after they had walked a block
down and half a block over they stood before the apartment-house of
that name, which was cut on the gas-lamps on either side of the heavily
spiked, aesthetic-hinged black door. The titter of an electric-bell
brought a large, fat Buttons, with a stage effect of being dressed to
look small, who said he would call the janitor, and they waited in the
dimly splendid, copper-colored interior, admiring the whorls and waves
into which the wallpaint was combed, till the janitor came in his
gold-banded cap, like a Continental porker. When they said they would
like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, he owned his inability to
cope with the affair, and said he must send for the superintendent; he
was either in the Herodotus or the Thucydides,