It was in the
Lease not to sing in the halls, not to call from story to story, not to
slide down the banisters. And there were blocks of banisters so smooth
and wide and beautiful that the attraction between them and the seats
of the little boy's trousers was like the attraction of a magnet for a
nail. Yet not a leg, crooked or straight, fat or thin, was ever to be
thrown over these polished surfaces!
It was in the Lease, too, that no peddler or agent, or suspicious
stranger was to enter the Santa Maria, neither by the front door nor
the back. The janitor stood in his uniform at the rear, and the lackey
in his uniform at the front, to prevent any such intrusion upon the
privacy of the aristocratic Santa Marias. The lackey, who politely
directed people, and summoned elevators, and whistled up tubes and rang
bells, thus conducting the complex social life of those favoured
apartments, was not one to make a mistake, and admit any person not
calculated to ornament the front parlours of the flatters.
It was this that worried the children.
For how could such a dear, disorderly, democratic rascal as the
children's saint ever hope to gain a pass to that exclusive entrance
and get up to the rooms of the flat children?
"You can see for yourself," said Ernest, who lived on the first floor,
to Roderick who lived on the fourth, "that if Santa Claus can't get up
the front stairs, and can't get up the back stairs, that all he can do
is to come down the chimney.
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