to heaven for retribution.  Standing alone and bare amidst its truck gardens, hideous, extreme, though typical of the entire settlement, composed of fragments ripped from once-appropriate settings, is a house with a tiny body painted strawberry-red, with scroll-work shutters a tender green; surmounting the structure and almost equalling it in size is a sky-blue cupola, once the white crown of the Sutter mansion, the pride of old Hampton.  The walls of this dwelling were wrested from the sides of Mackey’s Tavern, while the shutters for many years adorned the parsonage of the old First Church.  Similarly, in Hampton and in Fillmore Street, lived in enforced neighbourliness human fragments once having their places in crystallized communities where existence had been regarded as solved.  Here there was but one order,—­if such it may be called,—­one relationship, direct, or indirect, one necessity claiming them all—­the mills.

Like the boards forming the walls of the shacks at Glendale, these human planks torn from an earlier social structure were likewise warped, which is to say they were dominated by obsessions.  Edward’s was the Bumpus family; and Chris Auermann, who lived in the flat below, was convinced that the history of mankind is a deplorable record of havoc caused by women.  Perhaps he was right, but the conviction was none the less an obsession.  He came from a little village near Wittenburg that has scarcely changed since Luther’s time.  Like most residents of Hampton who did not work in the mills, he ministered to those who did, or to those who sold merchandise to the workers, cutting their hair in his barber shop on Faber Street.

The Bumpuses, save Lise, clinging to a native individualism and pride, preferred isolation to companionship with the other pieces of driftwood by which they were surrounded, and with which the summer season compelled a certain enforced contact.  When the heat in the little dining-room grew unbearable, they were driven to take refuge on the front steps shared in common with the household of the barber.  It is true that the barber’s wife was a mild hausfrau who had little to say, and that their lodgers, two young Germans who worked in the mills, spent most of their evenings at a bowling club; but Auermann himself, exhaling a strong odour of bay rum, would arrive promptly at quarter past eight, take off his coat, and thus, as it were stripped for action, would turn upon the defenceless Edward.

“Vill you mention one great man—­yoost one—­who is not greater if the vimmen leave him alone?” he would demand.  “Is it Anthony, the conqueror of Egypt and the East?  I vill show you Cleopatra.  Und Burns, and Napoleon, the greatest man what ever lived—­vimmen again.  I tell you there is no Elba, no St. Helena if it is not for the vimmen.  Und vat vill you say of Goethe?”

Poor Edward could think of nothing to say of Goethe.