the light of a rococo metal lamp set in the centre of the table.  This was to save gas.  There was usually a rump steak and potatoes, bread and “creamery” butterine, and the inevitable New England doughnuts.  At six thirty the whistles screeched again,—­a warning note, the signal for Edward’s departure; and presently, after a brief respite, the heavy bells once more began their clamour, not to die down until ten minutes of seven, when the last of the stragglers had hurried through the mill gates.

The Bumpus flat included the second floor of a small wooden house whose owner had once been evilly inspired to paint it a livid clay-yellow—­as though insisting that ugliness were an essential attribute of domesticity.  A bay ran up the two stories, and at the left were two narrow doorways, one for each flat.  On the right the house was separated from its neighbour by a narrow interval, giving but a precarious light to the two middle rooms, the diningroom and kitchen.  The very unattractiveness of such a home, however, had certain compensations for Janet, after the effort of early rising had been surmounted, felt a real relief in leaving it; a relief, too, in leaving Fillmore Street, every feature of which was indelibly fixed in her mind, opposite was the blind brick face of a warehouse, and next to that the converted dwelling house that held the shop of A. Bauer, with the familiar replica of a green ten-cent trading stamp painted above it and the somewhat ironical announcement—­when boar frost whitened the pavement—­that ice-cold soda was to be had within, as well as cigars and tobacco, fruit and candy.  Then came a tenement, under which two enterprising Greeks by the name of Pappas—­spelled Papas lower down—­conducted a business called “The Gentleman,” a tailoring, pressing, and dyeing establishment.  Janet could see the brilliantined black heads of the two proprietors bending over their boards, and sometimes they would be lifted to smile at her as she passed.  The Pappas Brothers were evidently as happy in this drab environment as they had ever been on the sunny mountain slopes of Hellas, and Janet sometimes wondered at this, for she had gathered from her education in the Charming public school that Greece was beautiful.

She was one of the unfortunate who love beauty, who are condemned to dwell in exile, unacquainted with what they love.  Desire was incandescent within her breast.  Desire for what?  It would have been some relief to know.  She could not, like Lise, find joy and forgetfulness at dance halls, at the “movies,” at Slattery’s Riverside Park in summer, in “joy rides” with the Max Wylies of Hampton.  And beside, the Max Wylies were afraid of her.  If at times she wished for wealth, it was because wealth held the magic of emancipation from surroundings against which her soul revolted.  Vividly idealized but unconfided was the memory of a seaside village, the scene of one of the brief sojourns of her childhood, where the air was fragrant with the breath of salt marshes, where she recalled, through the vines of a porch, a shining glimpse of the sea at the end of a little street....