As the Payton house fell into somnolence, Payton Street woke up. The air, stagnant between sun-baked brick walls, was a medley of noises that sometimes sank to a rumbling diapason, or sometimes stabbed the ear in single discords: the jangle of mule-bells, the bumping of the car on the switch, the jolt of milk-wagons over the cobblestones. In the provision-store all day long a parrot vociferated; from the livery-stable came the monotonous pounding of hoofs, or, when Mr. Baker sent out a hearse and some funeral hacks, the screech of grating wheels. Hand-organs came and went. Fruit-dealers cried their wares--"Strawberries! Strawberries! Strawb--" The ailanthus-shaded pavements swarmed with shrill-voiced children; they summoned one another to pull the parrot's tail or to look at the hearse; they assailed the ice-carts, reveling in the drip from the tail-boards and sucking what bits of ice they could scrape up. Sometimes they squabbled raucously, sometimes wept; sometimes, hushing their betraying giggles, crept into Mrs. Payton's front yard and climbed up on the iron dog "to play circus"--until Mrs. Payton, always on the watch, discovered them and sent Miss Carter down to drive them away. Except for skirmishes with the marauding children, Mrs. Payton's days were very placid. She worked out new puzzles and dozed through stories in the magazines. She wrote twice a week dutiful letters to her mother, pausing occasionally to think of something to say or to listen, absently, to the swish of the watering-cart along the street; she liked the wet smell of the watered cobblestones mingling with the heavy odor of the blossoming ailanthus. There never seemed to be anything to tell Mrs. Holmes, except that she had been dreadfully busy, and that the "accommodating" waitress didn't keep her sink clean, and that the barber's children were very trying. Every fine afternoon, sitting opposite Miss Carter and Morty, she drove out to the park and home again. Once she summoned up all her energy and went to Lakeville to spend a day with Fred. She thought that if she didn't go, Freddy would believe she preferred to stay with Morty. ("Oh, if I _only_ hadn't told her I loved him best!" she used to reproach herself.) It was a bitter thing to Mrs. Payton to pass through Laketon and see the place where a Payton girl ought to be, "instead of living with all kinds of people in Lakeville!" When Fred met her at the station and brought her to the ugly little cottage--its garish interior vivid, now, with yellow pennons--she tried, for the sake of peace, to restrain her disapproval of everything she saw, but she couldn't help saying she wondered how Fred could stand the solferino lamp-shade. "Hideous," Frederica said, carelessly, "so why look at it? I never look at our Iron Virgin." "There is some difference in value," Mrs. Payton reproved her.