It was due to Ruth, too, that they had so amiable a flat. Carl had been made careless of surroundings by years of hotels and furnished rooms. There was less real significance for him in the beauty of his first home than in the fact that they two had a bath-room of their own; that he no longer had to go, clad in a drab bath-robe, laden with shaving materials and a towel and talcum powder and a broken hand-mirror and a tooth-brush, like a perambulating drug-store toilet-counter, down a boarding-house hall to that modified hall bedroom with a tin tub which his doctor-landlord had called a bath-room. Pictures, it must be admitted, give a room an air; pleasant it is to sit in large chairs by fireplaces and feel yourself a landed gentleman. But nothing filled Carl with a more delicate--and truly spiritual--satisfaction than having a porcelain tub, plenty of hot water, and the privilege of leaving his shaving-brush in the Ericson bath-room with a fair certainty of finding it there when he wanted to shave in a hurry. But, careless of surroundings or not, Carl was stirred when on their return from honeymooning in the Adirondacks he carried Ruth over the threshold and they stood together in the living-room of their home. It was a room to live in and laugh in. The wood-work was white-enameled; the walls covered with gray Japanese paper. There were no portières between living-room and dining-room and small hall, so that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an effect of spaciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-à-brac, yet the rooms were not bare, but clean and trim and distinguished, with the large davenport and the wing-chair, chintz-cushioned brown willow chairs, and Ruth's upright piano, excellent mahogany, and a few good rugs. There were only two or three vases, and they genuinely intended for holding flowers, and there was a bare mantelpiece that rested the eyes, over the fuzzily clean gas-log. The pictures were chosen because they led the imagination on--etchings and color prints, largely by unknown artists, like windows looking on delightful country. The chairs assembled naturally in groups. The whole unit of three rooms suggested people talking.... It was home, first and last, though it was one cell in one layer of a seven-story building, on a street walled in with such buildings, in a city which lined up more than three hundred of such streets from its southern tip to its northern limit along the Hudson, and threw in a couple of million people in Brooklyn and the Bronx.