fancy worse in every
way-hungrier, raggeder, more wretchedly housed. But that wasn't the
period of life for us to notice it. Don't you remember, when we started
to Niagara the last time, how everybody seemed middle-aged and
commonplace; and when we got there there were no evident brides; nothing
but elderly married people?"

"At least they weren't starving," she rebelled.

"No, you don't starve in parlor-cars and first-class hotels; but if you
step out of them you run your chance of seeing those who do, if you're
getting on pretty well in the forties. If it's the unhappy who see
unhappiness, think what misery must be revealed to people who pass their
lives in the really squalid tenement-house streets--I don't mean
picturesque avenues like that we passed through."

"But we are not unhappy," she protested, bringing the talk back to the
personal base again, as women must to get any good out of talk. "We're
really no unhappier than we were when we were young."

"We're more serious."

"Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn't be so serious, if that's what
it brings us to."

"I will be trivial from this on," said March. "Shall we go to the Hole in
the Ground to-night?"

"I am going to Boston."

"It's much the same thing. How do you like that for triviality? It's a
little blasphemous, I'll allow."

"It's very silly," she said.

At the hotel they found a letter from the agent who had sent them the
permit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment. He wrote that she had
heard they were pleased with her apartment, and that she thought she
could make the terms to suit. She had taken her passage for Europe, and
was very anxious to let the flat before she sailed. She would call that
evening at seven.

"Mrs. Grosvenor Green!" said Mrs. March. "Which of the ten thousand flats
is it, Basil?"

"The gimcrackery," he answered. "In the Xenophon, you know."

"Well, she may save herself the trouble. I shall not see her. Or yes--I
must. I couldn't go away without seeing what sort of creature could have
planned that fly-away flat. She must be a perfect--"

"Parachute," March suggested.

"No! anybody so light as that couldn't come down."

"Well, toy balloon."

"Toy balloon will do for the present," Mrs. March admitted. "But I feel
that naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility."

When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green's card came up they both descended to the hotel
parlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish