k door. Oh, yes, sind him to me. Sind Tim Reilly to me, an' I'll
see, when me ol' man comes home late wid a bit of liquor in his head, if
it's not for me to conthrol 'im after our own fashions, widout the
inquisitin' of people who better be mindin' of their own n'ise. Kep' yez
awake, eh? Well, thin, see that yez never keep anybody else awake, an'
sind Tim Reilly to me!"

She was gone. We realized then that she had seen better days. So had we.
Later, when I passed her on the front steps, she nodded in her usual
expressionless, uncompromising manner.

I did not go to the landlord. It would be useless, we said. The
helplessness of our position was becoming daily more evident.

And with the realization of this we began to discover other defects. We
found that the house faced really almost north instead of west, and that
the sun now went behind the precipice opposite nearly as soon as it
touched the tops of our windows, while the dining-room and kitchen were
wretchedly dark all day long.

Then, too, the crooked fireplace in the former was a disfigurement, the
rooms were closets, or cells, the paper abominable, the wardrobe damp,
the drawers swollen or exasperating muftis, the whole apartment the
flimsiest sort of a cheap, showy, contract structure, such as no
self-respecting people should occupy.

We said we would move. We recited our wrongs to each other in detail and
began consulting Sunday papers immediately.

IV.

_Our First Move._

It was the Little Woman who selected our next habitation. Education
accumulates rapidly in the Metropolis, and I could see that she already
possessed more definite views on "flats and apartments" than she had
acquired on many another subject familiar to her from childhood.

Politics, for instance, do not exist for the Little Woman. Presidents
come and go, torchlight processions bloom and fade and leave not so much
as a wind-riffle on the sands of memory. The stock market, too, was at
this time but a name to her. Both of us have acquired knowledge since
in this direction, but that is another story. Shares might rise and fall
in those early days, and men clutch at each other's throats as ruin
dragged them down. The Little Woman saw but a page of figures in the
evening paper and perhaps regarded them as a sort of necessary
form--somewhat in the nature of the congressional reports which nobody
ever reads. Yet all her life she had been amid these vital issues, and
now, behold, a