front yard. The extension had a plate-glass
front and was occupied, Rose had noticed before she plunged into the
little tunnel that ran alongside it and led to the main building, by a
dealer in delicatessen. Over the edge of the flat roof, she could see
the top third of two endless streams of trolley-cars, for the traffic in
this street was heavy, by night, she imagined, as well as by day.

The opposite facade of the street, like the one of which her own wall
and window formed a part, was highly irregular and utterly casual. There
were cheap two-story brick stores with false fronts that carried them up
a half story higher. There were little gable-ended cottages with their
fronts hacked out into show-windows. There were double houses of brick
with stone trimmings that once had had some residential pretensions. The
one characteristic that they possessed in common, was that of having
been designed, patently, for some purpose totally different from the one
they now served.

The shops on the street level had, for the most part, an air of shabby
prosperity. There was, within the space Rose's window commanded, a cheap
little tailor shop, the important part of whose business was advertised
by the sign "pressing done." There was a tobacconist's shop whose
unwashed windows revealed an array of large wooden buckets and dusty
lithographs; a shoe shop that did repairing neatly while you waited; a
rather fly-specked looking bakery. There was a saloon on the corner, and
beside it, a four-foot doorway with a painted transom over it that
announced it as the entrance of the Bellevue Hotel.

The signs on the second-story windows indicated dentist parlors, the
homes of mid-wives, ladies' tailors and dressmakers, and everywhere
furnished rooms for light housekeeping to let.

The people who patronized those shops, who drank their beer at the
corner saloon, who'd be coming hurriedly in the night to ring up the
mid-wife, who smoked the sort of tobacco that was sold from those big
wooden buckets; the people who lounged along the wide sidewalks, or came
riding down-town at seven in the morning, and back at six at night,
packed so tight that they couldn't get their arms up to hold by the
straps in the big roaring cars that kept that incessant procession going
in the middle of the street--they all inhabited, Rose realized, a world
utterly different from the one she had left. The distance between the
hurrying life she looked out on through her g