They moved along through congested traffic, past the big docks, and turned in between the great ware-houses that line Mission Street.  The hot streets were odorous of leather and machine-oils, ropes and coffee.  Over the door of what had been Hunter, Baxter & Hunter’s hung a new bright sign, “Hunter, Hunter & Brauer.”  Susan caught a glimpse, through the plaster ornamentation of the facade, of old Front Office, which seemed to be full of brightly nickeled samples now, and gave back a blinking flash of light to the afternoon sun.

“Bathroom fixtures,” thought Susan.  “He always wanted to carry them!” What a long two years since she had known or cared what pleased or displeased Mr. Brauer!

The car clanged out of the warehouse district, past cheap flats and cheap shops, and saloons, and second-hand stores, boiling over, at their dark doorways, with stoves and rocking-chairs, lamps and china ware.  This neighborhood was sordid enough, but crowded, happy and full of life.  Now the road ran through less populous streets; houses stood at curious angles, and were unpainted, or painted in unusual colors.  Great ware-houses and factories shadowed little clusters of workingmen’s homes; here and there were country-like strips of brown palings with dusty mallow bushes spraying about them, or a lean cow grazing near a bare little wooden farmhouse.  Dumps, diffusing a dry and dreadful odor, blighted the prospect with their pyramids of cans and broken umbrellas; little grocery stores, each with its wide unrailed porch, country fashion, and its bar accessible through the shop, or by a side entrance, often marked the corners on otherwise vacant blocks.

Susan got off the car in the very shadow of the “works,” and stood for a moment looking at the great foundries, the dark and dirty yards, with their interlacing tracks and loaded cars, the enormous brick buildings set with rows and rows of blank and dusty windows, the brick chimneys and the black pipes of the blast-furnaces, the heaps of twisted old iron and of ashes, the blowing dust and glare of the hot summer day.  She had been here with Billy before, had peeped into the furnace rooms, all a glare of white heat and silhouetted forms, had breathed the ashy and choking air.

Now she turned and walked toward the rows of workingmen’s cottages that had been built, solidly massed, nearby.  Presenting an unbroken, two-story facade, the long buildings were divided into tiny houses that had each two flat-faced windows upstairs, and a door and one window downstairs.  The seven or eight long buildings might have been as many gigantic German toys, dotted with apertures by some accurate brush, and finished with several hundred flights of wooden steps and several hundred brick chimneys.  Ugly when they first were built, they were even uglier now, for the exterior was of some shallow plaster that chipped and cracked and stained and in nearly every dooryard dirt and disorder added a last touch to the unlovely whole.