CHAPTER IV—MUSCADINE STREET
WHILE Camilla and Henry Champney bent a dark and a white head over Aidee's book, Miss Eunice in the parlour bent a grey head over her knitting, and thought of Camilla, and disapproved of the type of girls who neither knitted nor even embroidered; who had hot cheeks, not over such subjects, for instance, as “Richard,” but over such subjects as “Problems of the Poor,” and “Civic Diseases.”
Miss Eunice looked up from her knitting now and then, and through the window she saw across the river the huddle of East Argent's disordered roofs, and factories, and chimneys powerfully belching black smoke, and disapproved of what she saw.
There were others than Miss Eunice who disapproved of East Argent. Dwellers on Herbert and Seton Avenues, those quiet, shaded avenues, with their clean, broad lawns, were apt to do so.
Yet it was a corporate part of Port Argent and the nearest way to it was over the Maple Street bridge.
The P. and N. Railroad passed under the East Argent approach to the bridge, coming from its further freight yards on the right. At the first corner beyond, if there happened to be a street sign there, which was unlikely, the sign would read “Muscadine Street.”
Muscadine Street left ran down the river toward the belching factories; Muscadine Street right, up the river between the freight yards on one side and a row of houses on the other; depressing houses, of wood or brick, with false front elevations feebly decorated; ground floors mainly shops for meat, groceries, liquors, candies; upper floors overrun with inhabitants. There were slouching men on the sidewalk, children quarrelling in the muddy street, unkempt women in the windows, of whom those with dull faces were generally fat, those with clever faces generally drawn and thin. It was a street with iron clamours and triumphant smells. It was a street whose population objected to neither circumstance, and found existence on the whole interesting and more than endurable. It was a street unaware of Miss Eunice Champney's disapproval, and undisturbed by that of Herbert and Seton Avenues. It is singular how many people can be disapproved of by how many others, and neither be the better or worse on that account.
On the second corner was a grocery occupying the ground floor of a flat-roofed, clap-boarded house. Around the corner, on a side street leading east, a wooden stair ran up on the outside. At the top of the stair a sign in black letters on a yellow background implied that “James Shays, Shoemaker,” was able to mend all kinds of footwear, and would do so on request. Inside the hallway, the first door on the right was the shoemaker's door, and within were two small rooms, of which the first was the shop.