At six-thirty every night that look lifted, for an hour.  At six-thirty they came home—­Floss, and Al, and Pa—­their faces stamped with the marks that come from a day spent in shop and factory.  They brought with them the crumbs and husks of the day’s happenings, and these they flung carelessly before the life-starved Rose and she ate them, gratefully.

They came in with a rush, hungry, fagged, grimed, imperious, smelling of the city.  There was a slamming of doors, a banging of drawers, a clatter of tongues, quarrelling, laughter.  A brief visit to the sick woman’s room.  The thin, complaining voice reciting its tale of the day’s discomfort and pain.  Then supper.

“Guess who I waited on to-day!” Floss might demand.

Rose, dishing up, would pause, interested.  “Who?”

“Gladys Moraine!  I knew her the minute she came down the aisle.  I saw her last year when she was playing in ‘His Wives.’  She’s prettier off than on, I think.  I waited on her, and the other girls were wild.  She bought a dozen pairs of white kids, and made me give ’em to her huge, so she could shove her hand right into ’em, like a man does.  Two sizes too big.  All the swells wear ’em that way.  And only one ring—­an emerald the size of a dime.”

“What’d she wear?” Rose’s dull face was almost animated.

“Ah yes!” in a dreamy falsetto from Al, “what did she wear?”

“Oh, shut up, Al!  Just a suit, kind of plain, and yet you’d notice it.  And sables!  And a Gladys Moraine hat.  Everything quiet, and plain, and dark; and yet she looked like a million dollars.  I felt like a roach while I was waiting on her, though she was awfully sweet to me.”

Or perhaps Al, the eel-like, would descend from his heights to mingle a brief moment in the family talk.  Al clerked in the National Cigar Company’s store at Clark and Madison.  His was the wisdom of the snake, the weasel, and the sphinx.  A strangely silent young man, this Al, thin-lipped, smooth-cheeked, perfumed.  Slim of waist, flat of hip, narrow of shoulder, his was the figure of the born fox-trotter.  He walked lightly, on the balls of his feet, like an Indian, but without the Indian’s dignity.

“Some excitement ourselves, to-day, down at the store, believe me.  The Old Man’s son started in to learn the retail selling end of the business.  Back of the showcase with the rest of us, waiting on trade, and looking like a Yale yell.”

Pa would put down his paper to stare over his reading specs at Al.

“Mannheim’s son!  The president!”

“Yep!  And I guess he loves it, huh?  The Old Man wants him to learn the business from the ground up.  I’ll bet he’ll never get higher than the first floor.  To-day he went out to lunch at one and never shows up again till four.  Wears English collars, and smokes a brand of cigarettes we don’t carry.”

Thus was the world brought to Rose.  Her sallow cheek would show a faint hint of colour as she sipped her tea.