"God knows I was only a foolish girl," Emeline would say, resting cold wet feet against the open oven door while Julia pressed a frill. "But your papa never was anything but a perfect ge'man, never! I'll never forget one night when he took me to Grant's Cafe for dinner! I was all dressed up to kill, and George looked elegant—"
A long reminiscence followed.
"I hope to God you get as good a man as your papa," said Emeline more than once, romantically.
Julia, thumping an iron, would answer with cool common sense:
"Well, if I do, I want to tell you right now, Mama, I'll treat him a good deal better than you did!"
"Oh, you'll be a wonder," Emeline would concede good-naturedly.
At very long intervals Emeline dressed herself and her daughter as elaborately as possible, and went out into the Mission to see her parents. With the singular readiness to change the known discomfort for the unknown, characteristic of their class, the various young members of the family had all gone away now, and lonely old Mrs. Cox, a shrivelled little shell of a woman at sixty-five, always had a warm welcome for her oldest daughter and her beautiful grandchild. She would limp about her bare, uninviting little rooms, complaining of her husband's increasing meanness and of her own physical ills, while with gnarled, twisted old hands she filled a "Rebecca" teapot of cheap brown glaze, or cut into a fresh loaf of "milk bread."
"D'ye see George at all now, Emeline?"
"Not to speak to, Mom. But"—and Emeline would lay down the little mirror in which she was studying her face—"but the Rosenthal children say that there's a man who's always hanging about the lower doorway, and that once he gave Hannah——"
And so on and on. Mrs. Cox was readily convinced that George, repentant, was unable to keep away from the neighbourhood of his one and only love. Julia, dreaming over her thick cup of strong tea, granted only a polite, faintly weary smile to her mother's romances. She knew how glad Emeline would be to really believe even one tenth of these flattering suspicions.