Fading fast was the glory of that bright new district on top of the second hill from the river where Uncle Tom was a pioneer.  Soot had killed the pear trees, the apricots behind the lattice fence had withered away; asphalt and soot were slowly sapping the vitality of the maples on the sidewalk; and sometimes Uncle Tom’s roses looked as though they might advantageously be given a coat of paint, like those in Alice in Wonderland.  Honora should have lived in the Dwyers’ mansion-people who are capable of judging said so.  People who saw her at the garden party said she had the air of belonging in such surroundings much more than Emily, whom even budding womanhood had not made beautiful.  And Eliphalet Hopper Dwyer, if his actions meant anything, would have welcomed her to that house, or built her another twice as fine, had she deigned to give him the least encouragement.

Cinderella!  This was what she facetiously called herself one July morning of that summer she was eighteen.

Cinderella in more senses than one, for never had the city seemed more dirty or more deserted, or indeed, more stifling.  Winter and its festivities were a dream laid away in moth balls.  Surely Cinderella’s life had held no greater contrasts!  To this day the odour of matting brings back to Honora the sense of closed shutters; of a stifling south wind stirring their slats at noonday; the vision of Aunt Mary, cool and placid in a cambric sacque, sewing by the window in the upper hall, and the sound of fruit venders crying in the street, or of ragmen in the alley—­“Rags, bottles, old iron!” What memories of endless, burning, lonely days come rushing back with those words!

When the sun had sufficiently heated the bricks of the surrounding houses in order that he might not be forgotten during the night, he slowly departed.  If Honora took her book under the maple tree in the yard, she was confronted with that hideous wooden sign “To Let” on the Dwyer’s iron fence opposite, and the grass behind it was unkempt and overgrown with weeds.  Aunt Mary took an unceasing and (to Honora’s mind) morbid interest in the future of that house.

“I suppose it will be a boarding-house,” she would say, “it’s much too large for poor people to rent, and only poor people are coming into this district now.”

“Oh, Aunt Mary!”

“Well, my dear, why should we complain?  We are poor, and it is appropriate that we should live among the poor.  Sometimes I think it is a pity that you should have been thrown all your life with rich people, my child.  I am afraid it has made you discontented.  It is no disgrace to be poor.  We ought to be thankful that we have everything we need.”

Honora put down her sewing.  For she had learned to sew—­Aunt Mary had insisted upon that, as well as French.  She laid her hand upon her aunt’s.

“I am thankful,” she said, and her aunt little guessed the intensity of the emotion she was seeking to control, or imagined the hidden fires.  “But sometimes—­sometimes I try to forget that we are poor.  Perhaps —­some day we shall not be.”