In the foreground of the view out of the window, was a large oblong plateau—­the flat roof of an extension which had casually been attached to the front of the building and carried it forward to the sidewalk over what had once been a small 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 grimy window, and that which she had been wont to contemplate through Florence McCrea’s exquisitely leaded casements, was simply planetary.