They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the perspective than an L road.  The fire-escapes, with their light iron balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women’s heads seemed to show at every window.  In the basements, over which flights of high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers’ shops abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and sausages, and cobblers’ and tinners’ shops, and the like, in proportion to the small needs of a poor neighborhood.  Ash barrels lined the sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him.  It was not the abode of the extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world, transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.

The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with wondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to appreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here under their noses.  It was to the nose that the street made one of its strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe.  “Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?” she demanded, with an exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.

“This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise,” he answered, with dreamy irony, “and may want us to think about the people who are not merely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend their whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it, except in a hearse.  I must say they don’t seem to mind it.  I haven’t seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York.  They seem to have forgotten death a little more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel.  And I wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous progress through their midst.  I suppose they think we’re rich, and hate us—­if they hate rich people; they don’t look as if they hated anybody.  Should we be as patient as they are with their discomfort?  I don’t believe there’s steam heat or an elevator in the whole block.  Seven rooms and a bath would be more than the largest and genteelest family would know what to do with.  They wouldn’t know what to do with the bath, anyway.”