As the girl bent forward there with her gaze fixed ardently on her aunt, her grandfather thought in half comic dismay, “Lord, now she’ll want to be a great speaker—­like her aunt.  And she will tell her mother so!”

“What’s the meeting all about?” he inquired.  And Deborah began to explain.

In her five schools the poverty was rapidly becoming worse.  Each week more children stayed away or came to school ragged and unkempt, some without any overcoats, small pitiful mites wearing shoes so old as barely to stick on their feet.  And when the teachers and visitors followed these children into their homes they found bare, dirty, chilly rooms where the little folk shivered and wailed for food and the mothers looked distracted, gaunt and sullen and half crazed.  Over three hundred thousand workers were idle in the city.  Meanwhile, to make matters worse, half the money from uptown which had gone in former years into work for the tenements was going over to Belgium instead.  And the same relentless drain of war was felt by the tenement people themselves; for all of them were foreigners, and from their relatives abroad, in those wide zones of Europe already blackened and laid waste, in endless torrents through the mails came wild appeals for money.

In such homes her children lived.  And Deborah had set her mind on vigorous measures of relief.  Landlords must be made to wait and the city be persuaded to give work to the most needy, food and fuel must be secured.  As she spoke of the task before her, with a flush of animation upon her bright expressive face at the thought that in less than an hour she would be facing thousands of people, the gloom of the picture she painted was dispelled in the spirit she showed.

“These things always work out,” she declared, with an impatient shrug of her shoulders.  And watching her admiringly, young Betsy thought, “How strong she is!  What a wonderful grown-up woman!” And Roger watching thought, “How young.”

* * * * *

“What things?” It was Edith’s voice at the door, and among those at the table there was a little stir of alarm.  She had entered unnoticed and now took her seat.  She was looking pale and tired.  “What things work out so finely?” she asked, and with a glance at Deborah’s gown,

“Where are you going?” she added.

“To a meeting,” Deborah answered.

“Oh.”  And Edith began her soup.  In the awkward pause that followed, twice Deborah started to speak to her sister, but checked herself, for at other dinners just like this she had made such dismal failures.

“By the way, Edith,” she said, at last, “I’ve been thinking of all that furniture of yours which is lying in storage.”  Her sister looked up at her, startled.

“What about it?” she asked.

“There’s so much of it you don’t care for,” Deborah answered quietly.  “Why don’t you let a part of it go?  I mean the few pieces you’ve always disliked.”