“Sh-h!” the other interrupted peremptorily. “There’s another one goin’ in!” She tiptoed to the edge of the porch and stood there entranced, following the movements of the birds, a vague smile irradiating her worn, sharpened, insignificant features. The shoving and spattering and small outcry finally subsided, the last robin hopped out, spinning the moisture from his feathers with quick wings; and she turned away reluctantly, drawing a long breath in childishly frank delight. “What d’you know about that, huh? I wouldn’ta believed they’d do that, take a bath that way. You couldn’ta _made_ me believe it? I don’t know much about ’em, but I always _have_ liked ’em. Birds, I mean, and--well, dogs and all kinds of regular pets, you know. I always did like ’em. Say, you got your grounds fixed up real nice, ain’t you? I like flowers, too.” She went down the steps, and Miss Wilcox trailed after, resigned to seeing the garden butchered to make a possible tenant’s holiday; but the visitor moved about carefully, without offering to pluck or mishandle, and paused at last in the middle of the tidy plot, surveying its beds and borders with full appreciation. Then she wheeled to appraise again the mid-Victorian house whose stark tastelessness and characterlessness no garden setting could relieve; and Miss Martha’s heart sank. “The neighbourhood’s very nice,” she murmured desperately; this ladylike insinuation went to the limits of propriety in salesmanship according to Miss Martha’s code. “So--so _permanent_. The church on the corner and the parsonage next door. It will always be nice. Everybody likes it so much on that account--that is----” She could get no farther, overcome by a hideous sense of disloyalty to this same neighbourhood whose select character she was exploiting. For, looking upon her, the conviction would not down that Mrs. Shields, if a possible tenant, was abysmally impossible otherwise. She must be near Miss Martha’s own age, yet was dressed, tinted, bedizened as if sixteen; there was a kind of withered pertness about her; she had a trick of glancing sidewise with her large, shadowed eyes in a style of roguish challenge and invitation combined; and her disturbingly frequent and facile smile suggested somehow a mere embellishment, obvious and inexpressive as her rouge. Such a figure in the rarefied atmosphere of Saint Luke’s was unthinkable; but here she was, Martha Wilcox, making capital out of that proximity with all its implications. Contact with “big business” had done its debasing work! “Of course, the music might be an objection,” she faltered, conscience-struck. “And sometimes one can hear Doctor Gowdy quite distinctly on Sundays in warm weather when the windows are open.”