character to their habitations. They have to take what they can get. But
people like us--that is, of our means--do give character to the average
flat. It's made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so
it's made for social show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby
in a flat! It's a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of
motherhood. The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social
life. It's made to give artificial people a society basis on a little
money--too much money, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the
building is put into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds.
I don't object to the conveniences, but none of these flats has a
living-room. They have drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they
have dining-rooms and bedrooms; but they have no room where the family
can all come together and feel the sweetness of being a family. The
bedrooms are black-holes mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each.
If it were not for the marble halls, and the decorations, and the
foolishly expensive finish, the houses could be built round a court, and
the flats could be shaped something like a Pompeiian house, with small
sleeping-closets--only lit from the outside--and the rest of the floor
thrown into two or three large cheerful halls, where all the family life
could go on, and society could be transacted unpretentiously. Why,
those tenements are better and humaner than those flats! There the whole
family lives in the kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but
the flat abolishes the family consciousness. It's confinement without
coziness; it's cluttered without being snug. You couldn't keep a
self-respecting cat in a flat; you couldn't go down cellar to get cider.
No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is
simply impossible in the Franco-American flat, not because it's humble,
but because it's false."

"Well, then," said Mrs. March, "let's look at houses."

He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expected
this concrete result. But he said, "We will look at houses, then."

X.

Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman's aberrations from some point
at which he, supposes her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses,
without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patient
wonder. She rather liked the worst of them best: but she made him go
down into the cellars and look at the fu