"You see, John, I have been dreadfully anxious, more than I could tell you. If anything goes wrong, I've always noticed that it isn't the big people that have to suffer; it's the smaller ones that get caught."
"Yes, it's an old story; the big flies break out of the spider's net; the little chaps hang there. But I'll settle up the business to-morrow. I shall have enough to buy us a little house in the country,—a snug box, with a garden; then I'll get a horse to drive about with, and we'll take some comfort. Come, little woman, sit on my knee! Come, baby, here is a knee for you, too!"
Holding them in his arms, he still mused upon the morrow, and once and again charged his mind to remember "two thousand for Sandford, ten thousand for Danforth and Dot!"
CHAPTER XXVII.
Alice did not feel the utter loneliness of her situation, until, as she walked along, square after square, she encountered so many hundreds of abstracted or curious or impudent faces, and reflected that it was upon such people that her future support and comfort would depend. She tried to discover in some countenance the impress of kindly benevolence;—not that she proposed to risk so much as a question; but it was her first experience with the busy world, and she wished to observe its ways, when neither relationship nor personal interest was involved. Small encouragement she would have felt to approach any that she met. Men of middle-age walked by as in dreams, cold, unobservant, listless; the younger ones, fuller of life, strode on with high heads, and flinging glances that were harder to bear than stony indifference, even. Ladies clothed in costly furs scanned the pretty face under the mourning bonnet with prying eyes, or tossed her a hasty, scornful look. Shop-girls giggled and stared. Boys rushed by, rudely jostling every passenger. Old women in scanty petticoats that were fringed by no dressmaker, with pinched faces and watery eyes, looked imploringly and hobbled along, wrapping parcels of broken victual under their faded shawls.—A sorry world Alice thought it. In the country, she had been used to receive a kindly bow or a civil "Good-morning!" from every person she met; and the isolation of the individual in the city was to her something unnatural, even appalling.
She had cut out some boarding-house advertisements from the daily papers, and her first care was to find a home suited to her slender means. Reaching the door of the first on her list, she rang and was shown into a small drawing-room, shabby-genteel in its furniture and ornaments. Two seamstresses sat chattering around the centre-table; while a ruddy young man, with greenish brown moustaches and sandy hair, rested his clumsy boots on the fender, holding an open music-book in his lap and a flute in his ill-kept and gaudily-ringed hands. The kitchen, apparently, was not ventilated; and a mingled odor, beyond the analysis of chemistry, came up into the entry and pervaded the hot and confined atmosphere of the room. The landlady, a stout and resolute woman, entered with a studied smile, which changed gradually to a cold civility. Her eyes, unlike Banquo's, had a deal of speculation in them. One might read the price-current in the busy wrinkles. Around her pursed-up mouth lurked the knowledge of the number of available slices in a sirloin,—the judgment of the lump of butter that should leave no margin for prodigality. Warfare with market-men, shrewish watchfulness over servants, economy scarcely removed from meanness at the table, all were clearly indicated in her flushed and hard-featured face.
Alice was not familiar with such people; but she shrank from her by instinct, as the first chicken fled from the first hawk. The landlady, on her part, was equally suspicious, and, finding that Alice had no relatives to depend upon, and that she expected to earn her own living, was not at all solicitous to increase the number of her boarders.
"It's pootty hard to tell who's who, now-a-days," she said. "I have to pay cash for all I set on the table, and I can't trust to fair promises. Perhaps, though, you've got some cousin that looks arter your bills?"
The flute-player exchanged knowing glances with the seamstresses.
All-unconscious of the taunt, Alice simply replied,—