ir lonesomeness. Bella knew some little girls in the
house, but in a ceremonious way; Tom had formed no friendships among
the boys at school such as he had left in Boston; as nearly as he could
explain, the New York fellows carried canes at an age when they would
have had them broken for them by the other boys at Boston; and they were
both sissyish and fast. It was probably prejudice; he never could
say exactly what their demerits were, and neither he nor Bella
was apparently so homesick as they pretended, though they answered
inquirers, the one that New York was a hole, and the other that it was
horrid, and that all they lived for was to get back to Boston. In the
mean time they were thrown much upon each other for society, which March
said was well for both of them; he did not mind their cultivating
a little gloom and the sense of a common wrong; it made them better
comrades, and it was providing them with amusing reminiscences for the
future. They really enjoyed Bohemianizing in that harmless way: though
Tom had his doubts of its respectability; he was very punctilious about
his sister, and went round from his own school every day to fetch her
home from hers. The whole family went to the theatre a good deal, and
enjoyed themselves together in their desultory explorations of the city.

They lived near Greenwich Village, and March liked strolling through
its quaintness toward the waterside on a Sunday, when a hereditary
Sabbatarianism kept his wife at home; he made her observe that it even
kept her at home from church. He found a lingering quality of pure
Americanism in the region, and he said the very bells called to worship
in a nasal tone. He liked the streets of small brick houses, with here
and there one painted red, and the mortar lines picked out in white,
and with now and then a fine wooden portal of fluted pillars and a bowed
transom. The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness
of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new
apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line with their towering
stories, implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in
continental Europe. In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed
in Greenwich Village, but no longer German or even Irish tongues or
faces. The eyes and earrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the
alleyways and basements, and they seemed to abound even in the streets,
where long ranks of trucks drawn up in Su