It was a narrow street, banked on either side by small, narrow brick
houses of the older type. Here and there gleamed out a scrap of a white
marble door-step, but most of the houses were approached by steps of dull
stone or of painted wood. There was a dejected and dreary air about the
place. The street was swarming with children in various stages of the
soiled condition.
Elizabeth timidly knocked at the door after being assured by the
interested urchins who surrounded her that Mrs. Brady really lived there,
and had not moved away or anything. It did not seem wonderful to the girl,
who had lived her life thus far in a mountain shack, to find her
grandmother still in the place from which she had written fifteen years
before. She did not yet know what a floating population most cities
contain.
Mrs. Brady was washing when the knock sounded through the house. She was a
broad woman, with a face on which the cares and sorrows of the years had
left a not too heavy impress. She still enjoyed life, oven though a good
part of it was spent at the wash-tub, washing other people's fine clothes.
She had some fine ones of her own up-stairs in her clothes-press; and,
when she went out, it was in shiny satin, with a bonnet bobbing with jet
and a red rose, though of late years, strictly speaking, the bonnet had
become a hat again, and Mrs. Brady was in style with the other old ladies.
The perspiration was in little beads on her forehead and trickling down
the creases in her well-cushioned neck toward her ample bosom. Her gray
hair was neatly combed, and her calico wrapper was open at the throat even
on this cold day. She wiped on her apron the soap-suds from her plump arms
steaming pink from the hot suds, and went to the door.
She looked with disfavor upon the peculiar person on the door-step attired
in a man's overcoat. She was prepared to refuse the demands of the
Salvation Army for a nickel for Christmas dinners; or to silence the
banana-man, or the fish-man, or the man with shoe-strings and pins and
pencils for sale; or to send the photograph-agent on his way; yes, even
the man who sold albums for post-cards. She had no time to bother with
anybody this morning.
But the young person in the rusty overcoat, with the dark-blue serge Eton
jacket under it, which might have come from Wanamaker's two years ago, who
yet wore a leather belt with gleaming pistols under the Eton jacket, was a
new species. Mrs. Brady was taken off her guard; else Elizabeth might have
found entrance to her grandmother's home as difficult as she had found
entrance to the finishing school of Madame Janeway.