grounds. Westward the star!

Fading fast was the glory of that bright new district on top of the
second hill from the river where Uncle Tom was a pioneer. Soot had killed
the pear trees, the apricots behind the lattice fence had withered away;
asphalt and soot were slowly sapping the vitality of the maples on the
sidewalk; and sometimes Uncle Tom's roses looked as though they might
advantageously be given a coat of paint, like those in Alice in
Wonderland. Honora should have lived in the Dwyers' mansion-people who
are capable of judging said so. People who saw her at the garden party
said she had the air of belonging in such surroundings much more than
Emily, whom even budding womanhood had not made beautiful. And Eliphalet
Hopper Dwyer, if his actions meant anything, would have welcomed her to
that house, or built her another twice as fine, had she deigned to give
him the least encouragement.

Cinderella! This was what she facetiously called herself one July morning
of that summer she was eighteen.

Cinderella in more senses than one, for never had the city seemed more
dirty or more deserted, or indeed, more stifling. Winter and its
festivities were a dream laid away in moth balls. Surely Cinderella's
life had held no greater contrasts! To this day the odour of matting
brings back to Honora the sense of closed shutters; of a stifling south
wind stirring their slats at noonday; the vision of Aunt Mary, cool and
placid in a cambric sacque, sewing by the window in the upper hall, and
the sound of fruit venders crying in the street, or of ragmen in the
alley--"Rags, bottles, old iron!" What memories of endless, burning,
lonely days come rushing back with those words!

When the sun had sufficiently heated the bricks of the surrounding houses
in order that he might not be forgotten during the night, he slowly
departed. If Honora took her book under the maple tree in the yard, she
was confronted with that hideous wooden sign "To Let" on the Dwyer's iron
fence opposite, and the grass behind it was unkempt and overgrown with
weeds. Aunt Mary took an unceasing and (to Honora's mind) morbid interest
in the future of that house.

"I suppose it will be a boarding-house," she would say, "it's much too
large for poor people to rent, and only poor people are coming into this
district now."

"Oh, Aunt Mary!"

"Well, my dear, why should we complain? We are poor, and it is
appropriate that we should live among the poor. Sometimes