the centre of the table. This was to save gas.
There was usually a rump steak and potatoes, bread and "creamery"
butterine, and the inevitable New England doughnuts. At six thirty the
whistles screeched again,--a warning note, the signal for Edward's
departure; and presently, after a brief respite, the heavy bells once
more began their clamour, not to die down until ten minutes of seven,
when the last of the stragglers had hurried through the mill gates.

The Bumpus flat included the second floor of a small wooden house whose
owner had once been evilly inspired to paint it a livid clay-yellow--as
though insisting that ugliness were an essential attribute of
domesticity. A bay ran up the two stories, and at the left were two
narrow doorways, one for each flat. On the right the house was separated
from its neighbour by a narrow interval, giving but a precarious light to
the two middle rooms, the diningroom and kitchen. The very
unattractiveness of such a home, however, had certain compensations for
Janet, after the effort of early rising had been surmounted, felt a real
relief in leaving it; a relief, too, in leaving Fillmore Street, every
feature of which was indelibly fixed in her mind, opposite was the blind
brick face of a warehouse, and next to that the converted dwelling house
that held the shop of A. Bauer, with the familiar replica of a green
ten-cent trading stamp painted above it and the somewhat ironical
announcement--when boar frost whitened the pavement--that ice-cold soda
was to be had within, as well as cigars and tobacco, fruit and candy.
Then came a tenement, under which two enterprising Greeks by the name of
Pappas--spelled Papas lower down--conducted a business called "The
Gentleman," a tailoring, pressing, and dyeing establishment. Janet could
see the brilliantined black heads of the two proprietors bending over
their boards, and sometimes they would be lifted to smile at her as she
passed. The Pappas Brothers were evidently as happy in this drab
environment as they had ever been on the sunny mountain slopes of Hellas,
and Janet sometimes wondered at this, for she had gathered from her
education in the Charming public school that Greece was beautiful.

She was one of the unfortunate who love beauty, who are condemned to
dwell in exile, unacquainted with what they love. Desire was incandescent
within her breast. Desire for what? It would have been some relief to
know. She could not, like Lise, find joy