"Preserve us! Indeed, if it was to die in it we were trying, it would be easy enough, but I'm thinking we'd make a poor show of living, Miss Evelyn! And used to the best as we are, too," said poor Bridget dolefully. I sprang a good ten pounds in rent at the sound of her pitiful voice, and ran my pencil through every address below that figure. Ten separate flats did we visit in the course of that day, and it was a proof of what Aunt Emmeline would call my stubbornness that I came through the ordeal without wavering. Regardless of Bridget's appealing eyes, I led the way forward, always affecting a buoyant hope that our next visit would be successful, while mentally I was holding a Jekyll and Hyde argument with my inner self, as follows:-- "Impossible to live in such warrens!" "_Other people_ manage to live in them all the year round!" "But, as Bridget says, I have been used to the best." "Quite time, then, that you take your share of the worst!" "My health might suffer--" "You have a good chance to recruit." "I might lose my looks--" "Disagreeable--but the world would go on, even if you did. Incidentally, you might improve the looks of other women!" "It would be awfully dull!" "At first--yes! Not when you get into stride. Helping other people is the most exhilarating of tonics." "I have never lived in a town. I should feel cramped, prisoned, stifled for air." "But think how you would feel when the day came to return to Pastimes! Wouldn't that first hour in the garden be glorious enough to repay you for all the exile?" Bridget's wheedling voice broke in on my argument:-- "Miss Evelyn, dear, I've been thinking--wouldn't it be a duty-like, to be having a bit of sun? Seems like we could wrestle along a bit better if we faced the right way!" Poor dear! Above all the drawbacks, it was the darkness of the interiors of those small flats which most perplexed the good countrywoman: the passages lighted only through the ground glass panels of bedroom doors; the windows shadowed by walls of other buildings, which towered up at but a few yards' distance; the kitchens staring blankly into a "well," ornamented with the suggestive spirals of a fire-escape. "If we could maybe face somewhere where there was a bit of green!" pleaded the eloquent Irish voice. "Sure the leddies and gentlemen you are meaning to help--you'll be more likely to find them in the place you'd choose yourself, if you were settling in earnest?" Bridget rolled an eye at blocks E, F, and G of a colossal pile of buildings which stretched their inky length over the two blocks of a narrow thoroughfare. "Cast your eye over them window curtains!" said she scathingly. "Ye can tell what's inside without troubling to look. A dirty, idle set that will sponge on you, and laugh behind your back!"