The apartment which the janitor unlocked for them, and lit up from those chandeliers and brackets of gilt brass in the form of vine bunches, leaves, and tendrils in which the early gas-fitter realized most of his conceptions of beauty, had rather more of the ugliness than the dignity of the hall. But the rooms were large, and they grouped themselves in a reminiscence of the time when they were part of a dwelling that had its charm, its pathos, its impressiveness. Where they were cut 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 there's no steam heat!” “No, ma'am,” the janitor admitted; “but dere's grates in most o' de rooms, and dere's furnace heat in de halls.” “That's 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 shouldn't 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? We're 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 husband's arm, “Now, if you don't give him a quarter I'll 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 hadn't been for my strength of character, you'd 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 husband's. “The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, I'll tell him the apartment doesn't suit at the threshold. It's the only way to manage you, Isabel.”