The lower hall had originally extended through the whole depth of the building to a rear doorway, equally old-fashioned but less elaborately ornamented, but now a partition crossed the raised circle on the ceiling from which had once hung an ancient candelabrum.  Upon each hallway opened four suites of two rooms each, and thus the old mansion usually sheltered twelve families instead of one.  The doors were high, and surmounted by quaint and worm-eaten carved work.

These halls seemed very dark and close to Mildred, who had just come out of the sunlight and from the country, but they were cool and spacious.  They were shown by the janitor to a room over twenty feet square on the second story, whose former occupants had left the souvenir of unlimited dirt.  “They was dissipated, and we don’t let sich stay in the buildin’,” said the man.  “That’s one thing in favor of the place, papa,” poor Mildred remarked, and at the moment it seemed to her about the only thing, for the old house was evidently going down hill so fast that it seemed to her as if it might carry its occupants with it.  Still, on further inspection, the room was found to be so large and airy and the ceiling so high that it might be made the abode of health and comfort.  Opening into the large apartment was another about eight feet by twelve, and this was all.

Mildred drew a long breath.  Could the whole domestic life of the family be carried on in those two rooms?  “I never realized how thousands of people live,” she sighed.

“It will only be for a little while, Millie,” whispered her father.

The young girl shrank and shivered even in the summer morning at the ordeal of crowded life, with only intervening doorways and thin partitions between them and all sorts of unknown neighbors.

“Suppose, papa, we look at the other rooms of which you have the refusal,” she faltered.

Even in his false buoyancy he could not suppress a sigh as he saw that Mildred, in spite of her determination to make the best of everything, had not imagined what a tenement-house was.  “We will be back in an hour or more,” he whispered to the janitor, for he believed the other rooms would appear still more repulsive.

And so they did, for when Mildred had climbed up three stairways in a five-story, narrow house, which even at that hour was filled with a babel of sounds, the old mansion seemed a refuge, and when she had glanced around the narrow room and two dark closets of bedrooms, she shuddered and said, “Papa, can we really afford nothing better?”

“Honestly, Millie, we cannot for the present.  My income is exceedingly small, although it will soon be increased, no doubt.  But if we pay too much for rooms we shall have nothing to live upon while waiting for better times.  These rooms are fourteen dollars a month.  Those in the old mansion are only eight, and the two rooms there give more chance for comfort than do these three.”