Nothing could abate Mrs.March's faith in her advertisements.

One of them sent her to a flat of ten rooms which promised to be the solution of all their difficulties; it proved to be over a livery-stable, a liquor store, and a milliner's shop, none of the first fashion.

Another led them far into old Greenwich Village to an apartment-house, which she refused to enter behind a small girl with a loaf of bread under one arm and a quart can of milk under the other.
In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to the acquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in their experience.

They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at which respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness.

Flattering advertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chiefly distinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes on their facades, till Mrs.March refused to stop at any door where there were more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand.
Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchets altogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim.
Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhere you like in New York, and he would have paused at some places where her quicker eye caught the fatal sign of "Modes" in the ground-floor windows.