In the crowded, unbeautiful part of the city were two streets forming as if the two long legs of the A we knew as children, the A with feet wide apart, that stood for Ape. A third street went from one to the other, as the little bar does across the A, but crooked, as a child's hand would draw it. This street was narrow, gloomy, and relatively quiet. The tide of traffic kept to the larger streets; the small street knew, beyond the occupants of its own houses and visitors to these, few but hurried foot-travellers who used it as a short cut, and people of inferior pretensions coming there to trade. The ground-story of almost every house was a shop; a person might have spent a life without real necessity for leaving the street. Here boots were made and mended; in the next door, clothes were sold (the dim show-windows were full of decent dresses, very good still for what you paid; you could be fitted even with a ball-dress, all beads and satin bows), yonder you could get money on deposit of your watch, or your flute, or your ear-drops; farther you could have yourself shaved. There was a window full of tarts and loaves; another window in which a roast fowl set its gold note, as some would say, between the pink note of half a ham and the coral note of a lobster. Across a certain one of the windows in that street for a long time had hung from a line, as from the belt of a savage, tails of hair--black, brown, blond. Below these, two featureless wax faces presented their sallow blankness to the passer, one wreathed with yellow curls, the other capped with brown waves of a regular pattern. Ordered around the twin turned-ebony stands were hairpins, sticks of cosmetic wrapped in silver paper, slabs of chalk laid on pink cotton, china pots with pictures of flowers or beauties and pleasing inscriptions in French, fuzzy white balls of down, combs, gilt-brass ornaments, kid-capped phials containing amber and ruby liquids. On the inside of the heavy shutter, caught back against the street-wall by day, was pasted a large print. This told you in what a prodigious way Madame Finibald's Gold Elixir would make your hair grow, and showed you the picture of a lady who doubtless had used it--her hair was extraordinary, it nearly reached to her feet.