To do so,
with all those noises fraying the edges of her brain, would be to
gibber!
In that neighbourhood front rooms were cheaper than rooms at the back.
Lodgers who could afford to do so paid extra money for a little extra
tranquillity. Neither Sadie Kirk nor Winifred Child was of these
aristocrats. Their landlady had thriftily hired two cheap flats in a
fair-sized house whose ground floor was occupied by a bakery, and
whose fire-escapes gave it the look of a big body wearing its skeleton
outside. She "rented" her rooms separately, and made money on the
transaction, though she could afford to take low prices.
In the street below the narrow windows surface cars whirred to and fro
and clanged their bells. In front of the windows, and strangely,
terribly near to the six-inch-wide balconies, furnished with withered
rubber plants, roared the "L" trains, jointed, many-eyed dragons
chasing each other so fast that there seemed to be no pause between at
any hour of the day or during most hours of the night. Private life
behind those windows was impossible unless you kept your blinds down.
If you forgot, or said wildly to yourself that you didn't care, that
you _must_ breathe and see your own complexion by daylight at any
cost, thousands of faces, one after the other, stared into yours.
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