The twenty-six children of the Santa Maria flats belonged to twenty families.  All of these twenty families were peculiar, as you might learn any day by interviewing the families concerning one another.  But they bore with each other’s peculiarities quite cheerfully and spoke in the hall when they met.  Sometimes this tolerance would even extend to conversation about the janitor, a thin creature who did the work of five men.  The ladies complained that he never smiled.

“I wouldn’t so much mind the hot water pipes leaking now and then,” the ladies would remark in the vestibule, rustling their skirts to show that they wore silk petticoats, “if only the janitor would smile.  But he looks like a cemetery.”

“I know it,” would be the response.  “I told Mr. Wilberforce last night that if he would only get a cheerful janitor I wouldn’t mind our having rubber instead of Axminster on the stairs.”

“You know we were promised Axminster when we moved in,” would be the plaintive response.  The ladies would stand together for a moment wrapped in gloomy reflection, and then part.

The kitchen and nurse maids felt on the subject, too.

“If Carl Carlsen would only smile,” they used to exclaim in sibilant whispers, as they passed on the way to the laundry.  “If he’d come in an’ joke while we wus washin’!”

Only Kara Johnson never said anything on the subject because she knew why Carlsen didn’t smile, and was sorry for it, and would have made it all right—­if it hadn’t been for Lars Larsen.

Dear, dear, but this is a digression from the subject of the Lease.  That terrible document was held over the heads of the children as the Herodian pronunciamento concerning small boys was over the heads of the Israelites.

It was in the Lease not to run—­not to jump—­not to yell.  It was in the Lease not to sing in the halls, not to call from story to story, not to slide down the banisters.  And there were blocks of banisters so smooth and wide and beautiful that the attraction between them and the seats of the little boy’s trousers was like the attraction of a magnet for a nail.  Yet not a leg, crooked or straight, fat or thin, was ever to be thrown over these polished surfaces!

It was in the Lease, too, that no peddler or agent, or suspicious stranger was to enter the Santa Maria, neither by the front door nor the back.  The janitor stood in his uniform at the rear, and the lackey in his uniform at the front, to prevent any such intrusion upon the privacy of the aristocratic Santa Marias.  The lackey, who politely directed people, and summoned elevators, and whistled up tubes and rang bells, thus conducting the complex social life of those favoured apartments, was not one to make a mistake, and admit any person not calculated to ornament the front parlours of the flatters.

It was this that worried the children.

For how could such a dear, disorderly, democratic rascal as the children’s saint ever hope to gain a pass to that exclusive entrance and get up to the rooms of the flat children?