THE place next door: it is big, undistinguished, run-down, a three-story, frame house, painted a bad green. It had the appearance of a crash-pad, and we had misgivings about it when we first looked at the house we ultimately bought in a "coming-back" neighborhood in Atlanta. But the other advantages prevailed, and when we moved in, we discovered that the green house was not a crash-pad, but rather was chopped into many small apartments occupied by what might be called working-class people. (Some, though, never did seem to get around to working.)

A middle-aged couple was in one of the apartments. The man was thin, sallow, unhealthy looking, and his wife was thin, hard-faced, harrassed looking. He spent his days in the apartment, would listen to baseball games on the radio. She worked. We supposed that he was in ill health—tuberculosis maybe, some war injury? They had a late-model car, a thing of pride. Then one week the car was gone—maybe sold, maybe repossessed. And the next week they moved out—by hand, on foot. She brought articles out and placed them in a grocery store shopping cart, and he would slowly push it down the sidewalk to the corner, turn it, and after a time return with the empty cart for another load. As in the little we had seen before of him, he seemed furtive, almost ashamed. What had happened in their lives to cause them to lose their car and now to move? Why not move and then get rid of the car? One trip in it would have been enough to carry all the little horde of possessions he pushed in the cart. We didn't ask them what had happened and didn't offer to let them put their things in our car to be hauled. It would have intruded on their privacy, and that was inviolable,