“No. What?”
“Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and cram it into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished. And look! he’s actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!”
This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken nails of a workman was doing—like a hungry dog. They kept up with him, in the fascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned down the side street still searching the gutter.
They walked on a few paces. Then March said, “I must go after him,” and left his wife standing.
“Are you in want—hungry?” he asked the man.
The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur.
March asked his question in French.
The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, “Mais, Monsieur—”
March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man’s face twisted up; he caught the hand of this almsgiver in both of his and clung to it. “Monsieur! Monsieur!” he gasped, and the tears rained down his face.
His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is by such a chance, and got back to his wife, and the man lapsed back into the mystery of misery out of which he had emerged.
March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for what had happened. “Of course, we might live here for years and not see another case like that; and, of course, there are twenty places where he could have gone for help if he had known where to find them.”
“Ah, but it’s the possibility of his needing the help so badly as that,” she answered. “That’s what I can’t bear, and I shall not come to a place where such things are possible, and we may as well stop our house-hunting here at once.”
“Yes? And what part of Christendom will you live in? Such things are possible everywhere in our conditions.”
“Then we must change the conditions—”
“Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forget them. We can stop at Brentano’s for our tickets as we pass through Union Square.”
“I am not going to the theatre, Basil. I am going home to Boston tonight. You can stay and find a flat.”
He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, and even of its selfishness; but she said that her mind was quite made up irrespective of what had happened; that she had been away from the children long enough; that she ought to be at home to finish up the work of leaving it. The word brought a sigh. “Ah, I don’t know why we should see nothing but sad and ugly things now. When we were young—”
“Younger,” he put in. “We’re still young.”
“That’s what we pretend, but we know better. But I was thinking how pretty and pleasant things used to be turning up all the time on our travels in the old days. Why, when we were in New York here on our wedding journey the place didn’t seem half so dirty as it does now, and none of these dismal things happened.”
“It was a good deal dirtier,” he answered; “and I 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 tonight?”
“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 flyaway 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
