If the city of Hampton was emblematic of our modern world in which haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to a back eddy of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of flotsam and jetsam had collected.  Or, to find perhaps an even more striking illustration of the process that made Hampton in general and Fillmore Street in particular, one had only to take the trolley to Glendale, the Italian settlement on the road leading to the old New England village of Shrewsbury.  Janet sometimes walked there, alone or with her friend Eda Rawle.  Disintegration itself—­in a paradoxically pathetic attempt at reconstruction—­had built Glendale.  Human hands, Italian hands.  Nor, surprising though it may seem, were these descendants of the people of the Renaissance in the least offended by their handiwork.  When the southern European migration had begun and real estate became valuable, one by one the more decorous edifices of the old American order had been torn down and carried piecemeal by sons of Italy to the bare hills of Glendale, there to enter into new combinations representing, to an eye craving harmony, the last word of a chaos, of a mental indigestion, of a colour scheme crying aloud to heaven for retribution.  Standing alone and bare amidst its truck gardens, hideous, extreme, though typical of the entire settlement, composed of fragments ripped from once-appropriate settings, is a house with a tiny body painted strawberry-red, with scroll-work shutters a tender green; surmounting the structure and almost equalling it in size is a sky-blue cupola, once the white crown of the Sutter mansion, the pride of old Hampton.  The walls of this dwelling were wrested from the sides of Mackey’s Tavern, while the shutters for many years adorned the parsonage of the old First Church.  Similarly, in Hampton and in Fillmore Street, lived in enforced neighbourliness human fragments once having their places in crystallized communities where existence had been regarded as solved.  Here there was but one order,—­if such it may be called,—­one relationship, direct, or indirect, one necessity claiming them all—­the mills.

Like the boards forming the walls of the shacks at Glendale, these human planks torn from an earlier social structure were likewise warped, which is to say they were dominated by obsessions.  Edward’s was the Bumpus family; and Chris Auermann, who lived in the flat below, was convinced that the history of mankind is a deplorable record of havoc caused by women.  Perhaps he was right, but the conviction was none the less an obsession.  He came from a little village near Wittenburg that has scarcely changed since Luther’s time.  Like most residents of Hampton who did not work in the mills, he ministered to those who did, or to those who sold merchandise to the workers, cutting their hair in his barber shop on Faber Street.