His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical point it had for themselves.  “You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work some of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you could do them very nicely.”

“Yes; I’ve thought of that.  But don’t let’s leave the personal ground.  Doesn’t it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you see the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then think how particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls?  I don’t see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors.”  He craned his neck out of the window for a better look, and the children of discomfort cheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits.  “I didn’t know I was so popular.  Perhaps it’s a recognition of my humane sentiments.”

“Oh, it’s very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselves for wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see how these wretched creatures live,” said his wife.  “But if we shared all we have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would it do?”

“Not the least in the world.  It might help us for the moment, but it wouldn’t keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they would go on just as before, only they wouldn’t be on such good terms with the wolf.  The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the wolf; then they can manage him somehow.  I don’t know how, and I’m afraid I don’t want to.  Wouldn’t you like to have this fellow drive us round among the halls of pride somewhere for a little while?  Fifth Avenue or Madison, up-town?”

“No; we’ve no time to waste.  I’ve got a place near Third Avenue, on a nice cross street, and I want him to take us there.”  It proved that she had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their coupe and do the rest of their afternoon’s work on foot.  It came to nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it.  She lost all patience with them.

“Oh, I don’t say the flats are in the right of it,” said her husband, when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian home.  “But I’m not so sure that we are, either.  I’ve been thinking about that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged—­in a coupe—­through that tenement-house street.  Of course, no child born and brought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home.  But that’s because those poor people can’t give character to their habitations.  They have to take what they can get.  But people like us—­that is, of our means—­do give character to the average flat.  It’s made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it’s made for social show, not for family life at all.  Think of a baby in a flat!  It’s a contradiction