olation of the individual in the city was to her something unnatural,
even appalling.

She had cut out some boarding-house advertisements from the daily
papers, and her first care was to find a home suited to her slender
means. Reaching the door of the first on her list, she rang and was
shown into a small drawing-room, shabby-genteel in its furniture and
ornaments. Two seamstresses sat chattering around the centre-table;
while a ruddy young man, with greenish brown moustaches and sandy hair,
rested his clumsy boots on the fender, holding an open music-book in his
lap and a flute in his ill-kept and gaudily-ringed hands. The kitchen,
apparently, was not ventilated; and a mingled odor, beyond the analysis
of chemistry, came up into the entry and pervaded the hot and confined
atmosphere of the room. The landlady, a stout and resolute woman,
entered with a studied smile, which changed gradually to a cold
civility. Her eyes, unlike Banquo's, had a deal of speculation in them.
One might read the price-current in the busy wrinkles. Around her
pursed-up mouth lurked the knowledge of the number of available slices
in a sirloin,--the judgment of the lump of butter that should leave no
margin for prodigality. Warfare with market-men, shrewish watchfulness
over servants, economy scarcely removed from meanness at the table, all
were clearly indicated in her flushed and hard-featured face.

Alice was not familiar with such people; but she shrank from her by
instinct, as the first chicken fled from the first hawk. The landlady,
on her part, was equally suspicious, and, finding that Alice had no
relatives to depend upon, and that she expected to earn her own living,
was not at all solicitous to increase the number of her boarders.

"It's pootty hard to tell who's who, now-a-days," she said. "I have to
pay cash for all I set on the table, and I can't trust to fair promises.
Perhaps, though, you've got some _cousin_ that looks arter your bills?"

The flute-player exchanged knowing glances with the seamstresses.

All-unconscious of the taunt, Alice simply replied,--

"No, I have told you that I have no one to depend upon."

The landlady's mouth was primly set, and she merely exclaimed,--

"Oh! indeed!"

"I think I'll look further," said Alice. "Good-morning."

"Good-morning."

Half-suppressed chuckles followed her, as she left the room. Sorely
grieved and indignant, she took her way to another house. Fortune this
time favored