tion with
their first beginnings in housekeeping, to restore the image of their
early married days and to make them young again.

It went on all day, and continued far into the night, until it was too
late to go to the theatre, too late to do anything but tumble into
bed and simultaneously fall asleep. They groaned over their reiterated
disappointments, but they could not deny that the interest was
unfailing, and that they got a great deal of fun out of it all. Nothing
could abate Mrs. March's faith in her advertisements. One of them sent
her to a flat of ten rooms which promised to be the solution of all
their difficulties; it proved to be over a livery-stable, a liquor
store, and a milliner's shop, none of the first fashion. Another led
them far into old Greenwich Village to an apartment-house, which she
refused to enter behind a small girl with a loaf of bread under one arm
and a quart can of milk under the other.

In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to the
acquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in their
experience. They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at
which respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness. Flattering
advertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chiefly
distinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes on
their facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at any door where there
were more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand.
Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchets
altogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim.
Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live
anywhere you like in New York, and he would have paused at some
places where her quicker eye caught the fatal sign of "Modes" in the
ground-floor windows. She found that there was an east and west
line beyond which they could not go if they wished to keep their
self-respect, and that within the region to which they had restricted
themselves there was a choice of streets. At first all the New York
streets looked to them ill-paved, dirty, and repulsive; the general
infamy imparted itself in their casual impression to streets in no wise
guilty. But they began to notice that some streets were quiet and clean,
and, though never so quiet and clean as Boston streets, that they wore
an air of encouraging reform, and suggested a future of greater and
greater domesticity. Whole blo