“He tells me they’re going to give women the ballot,—­doesn’t appear to be much concerned about his own womenfolks going to the polls.”

“Why shouldn’t they, if they want to?” Janet would exclaim, though she had given little thought to the question.

Edward would mildly ignore this challenge.

“He has a house on what they call Russian Hill, and he can watch the vessels as they come in from Japan,” he would continue in his precise voice, emphasizing admirably the last syllables of the words “Russian,” “vessels,” and “Japan.”  “Wouldn’t you like to see the letter?”

To do Hannah justice, although she was quite incapable of sharing his passion, she frequently feigned an interest, took the letter, presently handing it on to Janet who, in deciphering Alpheus’s trembling calligraphy, pondered over his manifold woes.  Alpheus’s son, who had had a good position in a sporting goods establishment on Market Street, was sick and in danger of losing it, the son’s wife expecting an addition to the family, the house on Russian Hill mortgaged.  Alpheus, a veteran of the Civil War, had been for many years preparing his reminiscences, but the newspapers nowadays seemed to care nothing for matters of solid worth, and so far had refused to publish them....  Janet, as she read, reflected that these letters invariably had to relate tales of failures, of disappointed hopes; she wondered at her father’s perennial interest in failures,—­provided they were those of his family; and the next evening, as he wrote painfully on his ruled paper, she knew that he in turn was pouring out his soul to Alpheus, recounting, with an emotion by no means unpleasurable, to this sympathetic but remote relative the story of his own failure!

If the city of Hampton was emblematic of our modern world in which haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to a back eddy of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of flotsam and jetsam had collected.  Or, to find perhaps an even more striking illustration of the process that made Hampton in general and Fillmore Street in particular, one had only to take the trolley to Glendale, the Italian settlement on the road leading to the old New England village of Shrewsbury.  Janet sometimes walked there, alone or with her friend Eda Rawle.  Disintegration itself—­in a paradoxically pathetic attempt at reconstruction—­had built Glendale.  Human hands, Italian hands.  Nor, surprising though it may seem, were these descendants of the people of the Renaissance in the least offended by their handiwork.  When the southern European migration had begun and real estate became valuable, one by one the more decorous edifices of the old American order had been torn down and carried piecemeal by sons of Italy to the bare hills of Glendale, there to enter into new combinations representing, to an eye craving harmony, the last word of a chaos, of a mental indigestion, of a colour scheme crying aloud