The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni

The Mitchells lived in an old-fashioned upper flat on a street that, before the great fire of 1906, had been a street of two-story wooden houses and small cottages set back in pleasant gardens. But the fire, sweeping the City's poorer quarters, had driven the inhabitants to the safety of the Mission hills; the little cottages had been converted into flats, the houses raised and small, congested shops inserted below. For the first two years, until the new city settled to permanent lines, there had been a bustle and cheap glitter through these streets, a cosmopolitan mingling of many different types and nationalities, that had touched the district faintly with romance. But now the better shops had gone, and only a few frowsy Italian immigrants continued in their untidy vegetable stands; disheartened widows managed small notion stores and bewailed to the wives of the petty clerks, also nailed to the district by low rents, the mythical comforts they had enjoyed "before the Fire."

The wooden houses were all dulled to the same sad gray by wind and sun and rain. The once pleasant gardens had shrunk to occasional slabs of hard brown earth railed off with rusty iron pickets. The front doors of the flats, raised three steps from the sidewalk, were all exactly alike, warped and dust-grimed, with oblong insets of glass two-thirds of the way up. Behind these insets, in brilliant curtains of silkoline, or conscientious Battenburg or negligent Nottingham, the tenants expressed their individuality against the engulfing monotony. The Mitchells had plain white scrim, of thick quality and tightly drawn on a brass rod. The doors of the upper flats worked by an uncertain mechanism managed from within. When this mechanism broke, if one lived in the top flat, one descended the endless stairs and worked the latch by hand. As a child, Anne had dreaded calling on friends and ascending, watched suspiciously from the heights above, until her identity was disclosed. There were ghastly stories of unsuspecting women who had so opened to burglars and been at their mercy.