Modistes and milliners crowded the second story. At the rear of the top floor there were two rooms, lit with skylights—and a dark kitchen the size of a pantry—to be had for $24 a month. These had once been studios, but the whole house had fallen into disrepair, its artistic tenants had abandoned it, and the owner was holding it and its neighbours for sale to any speculator who might wish to pull it down and put a modern office building on the site. He let the boys have the "top floor rear" on condition that they agree to accept two weeks' notice to leave at any moment. "Three times eight are twenty-four," Pittsey calculated. "It suits us to the fraction of a cent."
"The rooms are not very large," Conroy said doubtfully.
"They're not large enough for exercise, that's certain" Pittsey replied. "But they build them small in New York to leave more room for exercise out of doors." And the joke served to carry them over a doleful examination of their poverty-stricken apartment.
The stairs, as they went down, were bare as far as the next landing. Below, they were slippery with a worn linoleum. The last flight was more prosperously covered with a new cocoa matting. "It looks like the gradual reappearance of vegetation in a descent of the Alps," Pittsey laughed. They had to laugh with him.
They swept up the plaster of a fallen ceiling in the rear room, mopped the uneven floor, and scraped the dirt from the windows until Pittsey stopped them. ("Be economical," he said. "If you take that stuff
