Now, owing to their residence in the Santa Maria flats, and the Lease,
all was changed. The Lease was a strange forbiddance, a ukase issued by
a tyrant, which took from children their natural liberties and rights.
Though, to be sure--as every one of the flat children knew--they were
in the greatest kind of luck to be allowed to live at all, and
especially were they fortunate past the lot of children to be permitted
to live in a flat. There were many flats in the great city, so polished
and carved and burnished and be-lackeyed that children were not allowed
to enter within the portals, save on visits of ceremony in charge of
parents or governesses. And in one flat, where Cecil de Koven le Baron
was born--just by accident and without intending any harm--he was
evicted, along with his parents, by the time he reached the age where
he seemed likely to be graduated from the go-cart. And yet that flat
had not nearly so imposing a name as the Santa Maria.
The twenty-six children of the Santa Maria flats belonged to twenty
families. All of these twenty families were peculiar, as you might
learn any day by interviewing the families concerning one another. But
they bore with each other's peculiarities quite cheerfully and spoke in
the hall when they met. Sometimes this tolerance would even extend to
conversation about the janitor, a thin creature who did the work of
five men.
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