two-story red-brick houses. More than half of them are empty, tenantless
during the working hours. What hope is there for family life near the
hearth which is abandoned at the factory's first call? The sociableness,
the discipline, the division of responsibility make factory work a
dangerous rival to domestic care. There is something in the modern
conditions of labour which act magnetically upon American girls,
impelling them to work not for bread alone, but for clothes and finery
as well. Each class in modern society knows a menace to its homes:
sport, college education, machinery--each is a factor in the gradual
transformation of family life from a united domestic group to a
collection of individuals with separate interests and aims outside the
home.

I pursue my search. It is the dinner hour. At last a narrow door opens,
letting a puff of hot rank air blow upon me as I stand in the vestibule
questioning: "Do you take boarders?"

The woman who answers stands with a spoon in her hand, her eyes fixed
upon a rear room where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and
sputters.

"Come in," she says, "and get warm."

I walk into a front parlour with furniture that evidently serves
domestic as well as social purposes. There is a profusion of white
knitted tidies and portieres that exude an odour of cooking. Before the
fire a workingman sits in a blue shirt and overalls. Fresh from the
barber's hands, he has a clean mask marked by the razor's edge. Already
I feel at home.