st of those whose natures had been dwarfed and blighted in
the city's narrow soulless round of daily toil. Or it may be all of them
had fallen out among themselves before we came. I don't know. I know
that a good many of them had, for they told us about it--casually at
first, and then in detail.

As an example, we learned from the woman across the hall that another
woman, who occupied the top floor back and painted undesirable
water-colors, had been once an artist's model, and that she smoked. From
the top floor back, in turn, we discovered that the woman across the
way, now a writer of more or less impossible plays, had been formerly a
ballet girl and still did a turn now and then to aid in the support of a
dissolute and absent husband.

These things made it trying for us. We could not tell which was the more
deserving of sympathy. Both seemed to have drawn a pretty poor hand in
what was a hard enough game at best. And there were others.

Within the month we were conversant with all the existing feuds as well
as those of the past, and with the plots that were being hatched to
result in a new brood of scandals and counterplots, which were retailed
to the Little Woman and subsequently to me. We were a regular
clearing-house at last for the wrongs and shortcomings of the whole
establishment, and the responsibility of our position weighed us down.

We had never been concerned in intrigue before, and it did not agree
with our simple lives. I could feel myself deteriorating, morally and
intellectually. I had a desire to beat the Precious Ones (who were
certainly well behaved for children shut up in two stuffy rooms) or
better still to set the house afire, and run amuck killing and slaying
down four flights of stairs--to do something very terrible in
fact--something deadly and horrible and final that would put an end
forever to this melancholy haunt of Tuesday stews and ghoulish boarders
with the torturing tattle of their everlasting tongues. I shocked the
Little Woman daily with words and phrases, used heretofore only under
very trying conditions, that had insensibly become the decorations of my
ordinary speech.

Clearly something had to be done, and that very soon, if we were to save
even the remnants of respectability. We recalled with fondness some of
the very discomforts of apartment life and said we would go back to it
at any cost.

Our furniture was in storage. We would get it out, and we would begin
anew, profi