— 10 —Mrs. Sacret arrived early at her house. Some of her neighbors coming along the narrow streets with baskets of spring greens and onions stopped to speak to her. She regarded these women as very inferior beings and never gossiped with them, but today she listened to their inquisitive comments on her departure from Minton Street and her new tenant. Apart and agreeable in manner, she told them nothing and went into her cramped parlor to wait for the painter. The place seemed intolerably lonely. Under her prim disguise, of a woman in mourning, intent on sober business, was an increasing excitement and enthusiasm, a rising recklessness, ready to gush out and overwhelm her staid conventionality. An organ-grinder was playing at the corner; as she opened the window the luscious Italian melody
