“It’s better for me,” said the young wife, “because of the uncertainty of Mr. Bannister’s plans.”

“They’re all uncertain—­men,” submitted Mrs. Curley thoughtfully.  “That is, the nice ones are,” she added.  “You show me a man whose wife isn’t always worrying about him and I’ll show you a fool!”

“Which was Mr. Curley?” Martie asked, twinkling.  For she and his relict were the only women in the big boarding-house during the hot months, and they had become intimate.

“Curley,” said his widow solemnly, “was one of God’s own.  A better father seven children never had, nor a better neighbour any man!  He’d be at his place in church on a Sunday be the weather what it might, and that strong in his opinions that the boys would ask him this and that like the priest himself!  I’m not saying, mind you, that he wouldn’t take a drop too much, now and then, and act very harshly when the drink was on him, but he’d come out of it like a little child—–­”

She fell into a reverie, repeating dreamily to herself the words “a--little—­child—–­” and Martie, dreaming, too, was silent.

The two women were in one of the cool back bedrooms.  For hot still blocks all about the houses were just the same; some changed into untidy flats, some empty, some with little shops or agencies in their basements, and some, like this one, second-class boarding-houses.  On Second and Third avenues, under the elevated trains, were miles of shops; all small shops, crowded upon each other.  Every block had its two or three saloons, its meat market, its delicacy store, its tiny establishments where drygoods and milk and shoes and tobacco and fruit and paints and drugs and candies and hats were sold, and the women who drifted up and down all morning shopping usually patronized the nearest store.  In the basements were smaller stores where ice and coal and firewood and window-glass and tinware might be had, and along the street supplementary carts of fruit and vegetables were usually aligned, so that, especially to inexperienced eyes like Martie’s, the whole presented a delightfully distracting scene.

She accepted the fact that Wallace must come and go as best suited his engagements.  Her delight in every novel phase of life in the big city fired his own enthusiasm, and it was with great satisfaction that he observed her growing friendship with Mrs. Curley.

There were four or five men in the boarding-house, but they usually disappeared after an early breakfast and did not come back until supper, so that the two women had a long, idle day to themselves.  Henny, the coloured maid, droned and laughed with friends of her own in the kitchen.  Mrs. Curley, mighty, deep-voiced, with oily, graying hair and spotted clothes, spent most of the day in a large chair by the open window, and Martie, thinly dressed, wandered about aimlessly.  She never tired of the old woman’s pungent reminiscences, browsing at intervals on the old magazines and books that were scattered over the house, even going into the kitchen to convulse the appreciative Henny, and make a cake or pudding for dinner.