e pocketed his volume
and sat looking out into the gloom.

The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and
the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked
telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and
all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on
there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives' houses,
the showy gables of the "Eldorado" road-house--the only building in
Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished--then the company
"store," the machine shops and other out-buildings, the vast forbidding
bulk of the factories looming above the river-bend, and the sudden
neatness of the manager's turf and privet hedges. The scene was so
familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison, and his
absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes made
him forget the outward setting of their lives. But to-night he recalled
the nurse's comment--"it looks so dead"--and the phrase roused him to a
fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness
of it all--the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the
lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp
in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was
possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by
the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has
life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the
rush and drive of packed activities; but this out-spread meanness of the
suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding
life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its banishment
from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very
negation of hope and life.

"She's right," he mused--"it's dead--stone dead: there isn't a drop of
wholesome blood left in it."

The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river's sake,
the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of
pre-industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here,
beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several "leading citizens"
had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut "residences," with
porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood,
brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an
earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village h