Big Poker Site hazard of new fortunes 20

up into smaller spaces, it had been done with the frankness with which a proud old family of fallen fortunes practises its economies. The rough pine-floors showed a black border of tack-heads where carpets had been lifted and put down for generations; the white paint was yellow with age; the apartment had light at the front and at the back, and two or three rooms had glimpses of the day through small windows let into their corners; another one seemed lifting an appealing eye to heaven through a glass circle in its ceiling; the rest must darkle in perpetual twilight. Yet something pleased in it all, and Mrs. March had gone far to adapt the different rooms to the members of her family, when she suddenly thought (and for her to think was to say), "Why, but theres no steam heat!" "No, maam," the janitor admitted; "but deres grates in most o de rooms, and deres furnace heat in de halls." "Thats true," she admitted, and, having placed her family in the apartments, it was hard to get them out again. "Could we manage?" she referred to her husband. "Why, I shouldnt care for the steam heat if--What is the rent?" he broke off to ask the janitor. "Nine hundred, sir." March concluded to his wife, "If it were furnished." "Why, of course! What could I have been thinking of? Were looking for a furnished flat," she explained to the janitor, "and this was so pleasant and homelike that I never thought whether it was furnished or not." She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into the joke and chuckled so amiably at her flattering oversight on the way down-stairs that she said, as she pinched her husbands arm, "Now, if you dont give him a quarter Ill never speak to you again, Basil!" "I would have given half a dollar willingly to get you beyond his glamour," said March, when they were safely on the pavement outside. "If it hadnt been for my strength of character, youd have taken an unfurnished flat without heat and with no elevator, at nine hundred a year, when you had just sworn me to steam heat, an elevator, furniture, and eight hundred." "Yes! How could I have lost my head so completely?" she said, with a lenient amusement in her aberration which she was not always able to feel in her husbands. "The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, Ill tell him the apartment doesnt suit at the threshold. Its the only way to manage you, Isabel." "Its true. I am in love with the whole race. I never saw one of them that didnt have perfectly angelic manners. I think we shall all be black in heaven--that is, black-souled." "That isnt the usual theory," said March. "Well, perhaps not," she assented. "Where are we going now? Oh yes, to the Xenophon!" She pulled him gayly along again, and after they had walked a block down and half a block over they stood before the apartment-house of that name, which was cut on the gas-lamps on either side of the heavily spiked, aesthetic-hinged black door. The titter of an electric-bell brought a large, fat Buttons, with a stage effect of being dressed to look small, who said he would call the janitor, and they waited in the dimly splendid, copper-colored interior, admiring the whorls and waves into which the wallpaint was combed, till the janitor came in his gold-banded cap, like a Continental porker. When they said they would like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Greens apartment, he owned his inability to cope with the affair, and said he must send for the superintendent; he was either in the Herodotus or the Thucydides, and would be there in a minute. The Buttons brought him--a Yankee of browbeating presence in plain clothes--almost before they had time to exchange a frightened whisper in recognition of the fact that there could be no doubt of the steam heat and elevator in this case. Half stifled in the one, they mounted in the other eight stories, while they tried to keep their self-respect under the gaze of the superintendent, which they felt was classing and assessing them with unfriendly accuracy. They could not, and they faltered abashed at the threshold of Mrs. Grosvenor Greens apartment, while the superintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he called a private hall, and in the drawing-room and the succession of chambers stretching rearward to the kitchen. Everything had, been done by the architect to save space, and everything, to waste it by Mrs. Grosvenor Green.

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