There was a little bakery on this corner, with two gaslights flaring
in its window. Several flat pies and small cakes were displayed
there, and a limp curtain, on a string, shut off the shop, where a
dozen people were waiting now. A bell in the door rang violently,
whenever anyone came out or in. Susan knew the bakery well, knew
when the rolls were hot, and just the price and variety of the
cookies and the pies.

She knew, indeed, every inch of the block, a dreary block at best,
perhaps especially dreary in this gloomy pitiless summer twilight.
It was lined with shabby, bay-windowed, three-story wooden houses,
all exactly alike. Each had a flight of wooden steps running up to
the second floor, a basement entrance under the steps, and a small
cemented yard, where papers and chaff and orange peels gathered, and
grass languished and died. The dining-room of each house was in the
basement, and slatternly maids, all along the block, could be seen
setting tables, by flaring gas-light, inside. Even the Nottingham
lace curtains at the second-story windows seemed akin, although they
varied from the stiff, immaculate, well-darned lengths that adorned
the rooms where the Clemenceaus--grandmother, daughter and
granddaughter, and direct descendants of the Comte de Moran--were
genteelly starving to death, to the soft, filthy, torn strips that
finished off the parlor of the noisy, cheerful, irrepressible
Daleys' once-pretentious home. Poverty walked visibly upon this
block, the cold, forbidding poverty of pride and courage gone wrong,
the idle, decorous, helpless poverty of fallen gentility. Poverty
spoke through the unobtrusive little signs over every bell, "Rooms,"
and through the larger signs that said "Costello. Modes and
Children's Dressmaker." Still another sign in a second-story bay
said "Alice. Milliner," and a few hats, dimly discernible from the