glance the
blue lettered placard announcing the current price of butterine, and
walked around to the other side of the store, on Holmes Street, where the
beef and bacon hung, where the sidewalk stands were filled, in the
autumn, with cranberries, apples, cabbages, and spinach.

With little outer complaint she had adapted herself to the constantly
lowering levels to which her husband had dropped, and if she hoped that
in Fillmore Street they had reached bottom, she did not say so. Her
unbetrayed regret was for the loss of what she would have called
"respectability"; and the giving up, long ago, in the little city which
had been their home, of the servant girl had been the first wrench. Until
they came to Hampton they had always lived in houses, and her adaptation
to a flat had been hard--a flat without a parlour. Hannah Bumpus regarded
a parlour as necessary to a respectable family as a wedding ring to a
virtuous woman. Janet and Lise would be growing up, there would be young
men, and no place to see them save the sidewalks. The fear that haunted
her came true, and she never was reconciled. The two girls went to the
public schools, and afterwards, inevitably, to work, and it seemed to be
a part of her punishment for the sins of her forefathers that she had no
more control over them than if they had been boarders; while she looked
on helplessly, they did what they pleased; Janet, whom she never
understood, was almost as much a source of apprehension as Lise, who
became part and parcel of all Hannah deemed reprehensible in this new
America which she refused to recognize and acknowledge as her own
country.

To send them through the public schools had been a struggle. Hannah used
to lie awake nights wondering what would happen if Edward became sick. It
worried her that they never saved any money: try as she would to cut the
expenses down, there was a limit of decency; New England thrift, hitherto
justly celebrated, was put to shame by that which the foreigners
displayed, and which would have delighted the souls of gentlemen of the
Manchester school. Every once in a while there rose up before her
fabulous instances of this thrift, of Italians and Jews who, ignorant
emigrants, had entered the mills only a few years before they, the
Bumpuses, had come to Hampton, and were now independent property owners.
Still rankling in Hannah's memory was a day when Lise had returned from
school, dark and mutinous, with a tale of such a fam