cks of these downtown cross-streets seemed
to have been redeemed from decay, and even in the midst of squalor a
dwelling here and there had been seized, painted a dull red as to its
brick-work, and a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with a bright
brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large brass plate for its key-hole
escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect of purity and pride which
removed its shabby neighborhood far from it. Some of these houses were
quite small, and imaginably within their means; but, as March said, some
body seemed always to be living there himself, and the fact that none
of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her ideal of a fiat. Nothing
prevented its realization so much as its difference from the New York
ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly seven rooms and a bath. One or
two rooms might be at the front, the rest crooked and cornered backward
through in creasing and then decreasing darkness till they reached a
light bedroom or kitchen at the rear. It might be the one or the other,
but it was always the seventh room with the bath; or if, as sometimes
happened, it was the eighth, it was so after having counted the bath as
one; in this case the janitor said you always counted the bath as one.
If the flats were advertised as having "all light rooms," he explained
that any room with a window giving into the open air of a court or shaft
was counted a light room.

The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were go much
more repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; but
they could only do so upon the supposition that in their European
days they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice
whether rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high
or low. "Now we're imprisoned in the present," he said, "and we have to
make the worst of it."

In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of
him: it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath,
and live in both. They tried this in a great many places, but they never
could get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steam
heat and an elevator. At one place they almost did it. They had resigned
themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the prevalence of
modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New York),
to the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets, to
the faltering slats in the