Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he reasoned out later.  In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan.  He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents.  From detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made.  There were but four rooms in the little house—­three, when Martin’s was subtracted.  One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous departed babes, was kept strictly for company.  The blinds were always down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred precinct save on state occasions.  She cooked, and all ate, in the kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and ironed clothes on all days of the week except Sunday; for her income came largely from taking in washing from her more prosperous neighbors.  Remained the bedroom, small as the one occupied by Martin, into which she and her seven little ones crowded and slept.  It was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished, and from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly every detail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the soft chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of birds.  Another source of income to Maria were her cows, two of them, which she milked night and morning and which gained a surreptitious livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either side the public side walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping their eyes out for the poundmen.

In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept house.  Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch, was the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-writing stand.  The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space of the room.  The table was flanked on one side by a gaudy bureau, manufactured for profit and not for service, the thin veneer of which was shed day by day.  This bureau stood in the corner, and in the opposite corner, on the table’s other flank, was the kitchen—­the oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and cooking utensils, a shelf on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of water on the floor.  Martin had to carry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no tap in his room.  On days when there was much steam to his cooking, the harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous.  Over the bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle.  At first he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva, loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him out.  Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling southeaster drenched the wheel a night-long.  Then he had retreated with it to his room and slung it aloft.