to invest
ninety-five per cent of my salary each month in rent unless I could be
altogether certain that the Little Woman and the Precious Ones could
modify their appetites and remain quite well.

Being enthusiastic at first, we examined some of these apartments and
the Little Woman acquired credit in my eyes as we proceeded. I did not
realize until now the progress she had made since the day of our arrival
in Gotham nearly four years previous. Her education was complete--she
was a graduate in the great school of flat-life, and was contemplating a
post-graduate course. Figures that made me gasp and sustain myself by
the silver-mounted plumbing left her quite undisturbed. From her manner
you would suppose that it was only the desirability of the apartment
itself that was worth consideration. She criticised the arrangement of
the rooms and the various appointments with an air of real consequence,
while the janitor and I followed her about, humble and unimportant,
wondering how we could ever have imagined the place suitable to her
requirements.

In one place where the rent was twenty-four hundred it seemed almost
impossible to find fault. I began to be frightened for the Little Woman,
in the thought that now, after all, she really would be obliged to
confess that the little trifle of eighteen hundred dollars a year more
than we could possibly pay rendered the place undesirable. But a moment
later I realized how little I knew her. When we got to the kitchen she
remarked, passively, there was no morning sun in the windows. As the
apartment faced east, and there was morning sun in the parlor, this
condition seemed more or less normal, as the janitor meekly pointed out.
But the Little Woman declared she would never live in another place
where the kitchen was dark mornings, and turned away, leaving the
janitor scratching his head over the problem of making the sun shine
from two directions at once and remaining in that position all day long.

Still it was a narrow escape, and we were consuming time. So we
contented ourselves after that with merely inquiring the size and price
of the apartment of the hall-boy, and passing on. Even this grew
monotonous at length, and we gradually drifted into the outer edges of
the chosen district, and from the outer edges into that Section wherein
we had made our first beginning nearly four years before, the great
wilderness lying north of One Hundred and Sixteenth Street. Then we
began work