two who had come in, would begin to gasp that this
was the worst yet. This was awful. The heat had a positive and brassy
quality, there was no air stirring. The children in the Park would drag
home in the hot sunset light, tired, dirty, whining, and a breathless
evening follow the burning day. Then Martie and Mrs. Curley and mild
little Mr. Bull and bellicose Mr. Snow would perhaps sit on the steps
until eleven o'clock, exchanging pleasantries with various neighbours,
wilted like themselves in the furnace of the day.

Martie liked the sense of extremes, as they all did. In a few months
they would be shaking their heads over a blizzard with the same solemn
enjoyment. She liked the suddenly darkening sky, the ominous rattle of
thunder; "like boxes being smashed," she wrote Sally. She fairly sang
when the rain began to stream down, washing, cooling, cleansing.

From the window of the back bedroom she looked down to-day upon a
stretch of bare, fenced backyards. Here and there a cat slept in the
shade, or moved silently from shadow to shadow. From some of the
opposite windows strings of washed garments depended, and upon one
fire-escape two girls were curled, talking and reading.

Her hostess was the source of much affectionate amusement to Martie,
and as the old lady liked nothing so much as an appreciative listener,
they got on splendidly. Martie laughed at the older woman's accounts of
quarrels, births, and law-suits, thrilled over the details of sudden
deaths, murders, and mysteries, and drank in with a genuine dramatic
appreciation the vision of a younger, simpler city. No subway, no
telephones, no motor cars, no elevated roads--what had New York been
like when Mrs. Curley was a bride? Booth and Parepa Rosa and Adelina
Patti walked the boards again; the terrible Civil War was fought; the
draft riots raged in the streets; the great President was murdered.
There was no old family in the city of whose antecedents Mrs. Curley
did not know something. "The airs of them!" she would say, musing over
a newspaper list of "among those present." "I could tell them
something!"

Martie did not understand how any woman could really be content with
this dark old house, this business, these empty days, but she realized
that Mrs. Curley was free to adopt some other mode of living had she
pleased. Gradually Martie pieced the old woman's history together;
there had been plenty of change, prosperity, and excitement in her
life. She had