over their prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating.  Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square, or just below the Cooper Institute—­they’re the gayest things in the world.  Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque!  And the whole city is so,” said March, “or else the L would never have got built here.  New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince or pauper, it’s gay always.”

“Yes, gay is the word,” she admitted, with a sigh.  “But frantic.  I can’t get used to it.  They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’ve ever found much advantage in remembering it.”

“Don’t say such a thing, dearest.”

He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the present, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far as it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare of flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let her.  She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing such a thing; and they dragged through the day.  She was too tired to care for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herself with a cry that roused him, too.  It was something about the children at first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling asleep, and then it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sections growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrous articulate was quite luminous again.  She shuddered at the vague description she was able to give; but he asked, “Did it offer to bite you?”

“No.  That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth.”

March laughed.  “Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York flat—­seven rooms and a bath.”

“I really believe it was,” she consented, recognizing an architectural resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work before them.

IX.

Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements, and by reverting to agents.  Some of these induced them to consider the idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkerson by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted herself.  They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated rooms.  They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.