I found her living in one of those curious, compressed city houses, one room wide and three deep, which, after the rambling, scattered homes of Higgleston, induced a feeling of cramp, until I discovered a kind of spaciousness in the life within. It was really very little else than relief from the accustomed inharmonies of rurality, a sort of scenic air and light that answered perfectly so long as you believed it real. Pauline's wall papers were soft, unpatterned, with wide borders; her windows were hung with plain scrim and the furniture coverings were in tone with the carpets. When ladies called in the afternoon, Pauline gave them tea which she made in a brass kettle over a spirit lamp. You can scarcely understand what that kettle stood for in my new estimate of the graciousness of living: a kind of sacred flame, round which gathered unimagined possibilities for the dramatization of that eager inward life which, now that the strictures of bodily pain were loosed, began to press toward expression. It rose insistently against the depressing figure my draggled and defeated condition must have cut in the face of Pauline's bright competency and the quality of assurance in her choice of the things among which she moved. Whatever her standards of behaviour or furniture, they were always present to the eye, not sunk below the plane of consciousness like mine, and she could always name you the people who practised them or the places where they could be bought and at what price. My expressed interest in the teakettle, led at once to the particular department store where I saw rows of them shining in the ticketed inaccessibility of seven dollars and ninety-eight cents. From point to point of such eminent practicability I was pricked to think of preëmpting some of these new phases of suitability for myself, finding myself debarred by the flatness of my purse. The effect of it was to throw me back into the benumbing sense of personal neglect with which the city had burst upon me. From the first, as I began to go about still in my half-invalided condition, I had been tremendously struck with the plentitude of beauty. Here was every article of human use made fair and fit so that nobody need have lacked a portion of it, save for an inexplicable error in the means of distribution. I, for instance, who had within me the witness of heirship, had none of it.