Hagar knew how to orientate herself very well. She took the surface car going in the right direction, and when she had travelled some distance she left it and took a cross-town car. This brought her to the block she wished. Out of the jingling car, across a street of push-carts and drays and hurrying, dodging people, she stood upon the broken and littered pavement a moment to look about her. The houses were tall and dreary; once good, a house to a family, but now not so good, and several families to a house. The corners were occupied by larger buildings, unadorned and jerry-built and ugly, each with a high-sounding name, each containing "flats";—flats and flats and flats, each with its ground floor occupied by small stores—unprosperous greengrocer, unprosperous butcher, poor chemist, prosperous saloon, and what not. It was a grimy, chilly grey afternoon with more than a hint of the approaching winter. All voices seemed raw and all colours cold. Among the children playing on the pavement and in areaways or on high, broken, entrance steps, there sounded more crying than laughing. Dirty papers were blown up and down; there floated an odour of stale beer; an old-clothes man went by, ringing a bell and crying harshly, "Old clothes! Old clothes! Got any rags?" Hagar stood with contracted brows. She shivered a little. "Why, Thomasine should not live in a place like this!" She looked about her. "Who should?" She had a vision of Thomasine playing ring-around-a-rosy, Thomasine looking for four-leaved clovers.
But when she climbed to the third floor of one of the corner buildings, and, standing in the perpetual twilight of the landing-way, rang the bell of a door from which much of the paint had been scarred, she found that Thomasine did not live there.
The door was opened by a gaunt, raw-boned woman. "Thomasine Dale? Did she live with Marietta Green and Jim?"
"Yes. She is Jim's niece."
"Well, she don't live here now."
"May I see Jim or his wife?"
"They don't live here neither."
The door across the landing opened, and a stout woman in a checked apron looked out. "Was you looking for the Greens?"
"Yes, please."