journeys—­as clean as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when it was scoured and dusted to her satisfaction she would sally forth to Bonnaccossi’s grocery and provision store on the corner to do her bargaining in competition with the Italian housewives of the neighborhood.  She was wont, indeed, to pause outside for a moment, her quick eye encompassing the coloured prints of red and yellow jellies cast in rounded moulds, decked with slices of orange, the gaudy boxes of cereals and buckwheat flour, the “Brookfield” eggs in packages.  Significant, this modern package system, of an era of flats with little storage space.  She took in at a glance the blue lettered placard announcing the current price of butterine, and walked around to the other side of the store, on Holmes Street, where the beef and bacon hung, where the sidewalk stands were filled, in the autumn, with cranberries, apples, cabbages, and spinach.

With little outer complaint she had adapted herself to the constantly lowering levels to which her husband had dropped, and if she hoped that in Fillmore Street they had reached bottom, she did not say so.  Her unbetrayed regret was for the loss of what she would have called “respectability”; and the giving up, long ago, in the little city which had been their home, of the servant girl had been the first wrench.  Until they came to Hampton they had always lived in houses, and her adaptation to a flat had been hard—­a flat without a parlour.  Hannah Bumpus regarded a parlour as necessary to a respectable family as a wedding ring to a virtuous woman.  Janet and Lise would be growing up, there would be young men, and no place to see them save the sidewalks.  The fear that haunted her came true, and she never was reconciled.  The two girls went to the public schools, and afterwards, inevitably, to work, and it seemed to be a part of her punishment for the sins of her forefathers that she had no more control over them than if they had been boarders; while she looked on helplessly, they did what they pleased; Janet, whom she never understood, was almost as much a source of apprehension as Lise, who became part and parcel of all Hannah deemed reprehensible in this new America which she refused to recognize and acknowledge as her own country.

To send them through the public schools had been a struggle.  Hannah used to lie awake nights wondering what would happen if Edward became sick.  It worried her that they never saved any money:  try as she would to cut the expenses down, there was a limit of decency; New England thrift, hitherto justly celebrated, was put to shame by that which the foreigners displayed, and which would have delighted the souls of gentlemen of the Manchester school.  Every once in a while there rose up before her fabulous instances of this thrift, of Italians and Jews who, ignorant emigrants, had entered the mills only a few years before they, the Bumpuses, had come to Hampton, and were now independent property owners.  Still rankling in Hannah’s memory was a day when Lise had returned from school, dark and mutinous, with a tale of such a family.  One of the younger children was a classmate.