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Rh way, gives egress up a flight of steps. All is dark, mossy, and quiet. Over the top of the wall great strands of ivy hang, and only an angle of windowed roof rises above the sheltering cypress- and pepper-trees.

But through decay, poverty, and dirt the love of beauty still spoke. It met Viola's eye and gave her its message in the touch of green, in the brilliant blossom that rejoiced in its existence on balcony-rail and window-ledge. Flowers were the one ornament that was cheap. They hung from windows, and stretched out frail blossoms from shadowed angles. They grew bushily in glad luxuriance on sunny roofs, and put forth buds of perfect beauty behind broken, grimy panes. When the sun touched them they bloomed, bravely, splendidly, prodigally, giving forth their best. Old verandas, sagging under their weight of decrepitude and household overflow, held their gardens. In the most menacing of the alleys there was the gleam of flower and leaf from starch- and soap-boxes on the ledges below unwashed, unshuttered casements. Viola had seen children leaning over the sills as they searched with pouting, busy gravity for a bud to pluck; and sometimes she caught a glimpse of the coarse, painted face of some humble Aspasia of the quarter bending over her window-garden, where the flowers bloomed as