THE EXILES
THE street was a narrow lane of asphalt between two walls of brownstone house-fronts; and these two walls were so exactly alike that each seemed to be staring, with all its shutterless windows, across the roadway at the other, in the dumb amazement of a man meeting his double. Both were ruled lengthwise in the same four rows of windows. Each window was like all its fellows. All were arranged as regularly in line as the inch-marks on a yardstick; and at every third window in the lowest row, a house was marked off—as if it were a foot on the rule—by the projection of a brownstone stoop, from which a flight of steps led down to the sidewalk.
It had once been a street of homes; and, in its prosperous days, its stiff monotony must have realized the ideal of the lives that were lived there, then, according to the strictest conventions of respectability. But now it had fallen into shabbiness and disrepair, and its set, methodical air seemed only proper to such a street of boarding-houses where the conduct of life was chiefly an affair of subdividing identical days into sleeping, waking, and eating, joylessly, by the clock.
It was to this street that the dining-room maid in Mrs. Henry's boarding-house had to look for entertain-
301
