Here are no brown-stone fronts, no elegant homes, but the imprint of poverty is upon all.
Long years before the place was a fashionable locality; but the rapid growth of the city forced the wealthy residents up town, and into their homes, not then as now, superb structures, palatial in their fittings, the poorer classes moved, to again give place to those of a still lower strata of the society that goes to make up the world to be found in metropolitan life.
In a tenement-flat, on the fourth floor of a dingy-looking building, a woman sat alone, a piece of embroidery in her hands.
The flat consisted of four rooms, one large one in the front, with a hall-room adjoining, and the same in the rear.
Those in the front were used as sitting-room and bed-room; those in the rear, the larger one for a kitchen and dining-room combined, the smaller for a sleeping-chamber, for there was a cot in it.
The furniture was very scant, and cheap-looking, there being nothing more than was actually necessary for use.
But an air of cleanliness was upon all, and the woman who sat alone in the front room had the appearance of one reared in refinement, one who had seen better days ere she had come to feel the pinching of poverty.
She was neatly clad in a black cashmere dress that was a trifle seedy, and which appeared to have been often brushed.
Her form was slender, very graceful, and her face was beautiful yet sad, while her large eyes were sunken and inflamed as though from weeping.
The work she was engaged upon ill accorded with the rooms and surroundings, for she was embroidering a silk scarf of a rare and costly pattern, and she kept it folded closely in a clean towel, excepting the part upon which her slender, skilful fingers worked.