“Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity, supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting,” he suggested.  She fell in with the notion.  “I’m beginning to feel crazy.  But I don’t want you to lose your head, Basil.  And I don’t want you to sentimentalize any of the things you see in New York.  I think you were disposed to do it in that street we drove through.  I don’t believe there’s any real suffering—­not real suffering—­among those people; that is, it would be suffering from our point of view, but they’ve been used to it all their lives, and they don’t feel their’ discomfort so much.”

“Of course, I understand that, and I don’t propose to sentimentalize them.  I think when people get used to a bad state of things they had better stick to it; in fact, they don’t usually like a better state so well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind.”

She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue, exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar, toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home to their hotel.  “Now to-night we will go to the theatre,” she said, “and get this whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh for a new start in the morning.”  Suddenly she clutched his arm.  “Why, did you see that man?” and she signed with her head toward a decently dressed person who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as if to examine it, and half halting at times.

“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 alms-giver 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.”