plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect of purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far from it.  Some of these houses were quite small, and imaginably within their means; but, as March said, some body seemed always to be living there himself, and the fact that none of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her ideal of a fiat.  Nothing prevented its realization so much as its difference from the New York ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly seven rooms and a bath.  One or two rooms might be at the front, the rest crooked and cornered backward through in creasing and then decreasing darkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen at the rear.  It might be the one or the other, but it was always the seventh room with the bath; or if, as sometimes happened, it was the eighth, it was so after having counted the bath as one; in this case the janitor said you always counted the bath as one.  If the flats were advertised as having “all light rooms,” he explained that any room with a window giving into the open air of a court or shaft was counted a light room.

The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were go much more repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; but they could only do so upon the supposition that in their European days they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice whether rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high or low.  “Now we’re imprisoned in the present,” he said, “and we have to make the worst of it.”

In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of him:  it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath, and live in both.  They tried this in a great many places, but they never could get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steam heat and an elevator.  At one place they almost did it.  They had resigned themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the prevalence of modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New York), to the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets, to the faltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and the crumbled brownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of the apartments had been taken between two visits they made.  Then the only combination left open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the right and a third-floor flat to the left.

Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the first opportunity.  In the mean time there were several flats which they thought they could almost make do:  notably one where they could get an extra servant’s room in the basement four flights down, and another where they could get it in the roof five flights up.  At the first the janitor was respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of ironical pessimism.  When they trembled on the verge of taking his apartment, he pointed out a spot