Martie did not understand how any woman could really be content with this dark old house, this business, these empty days, but she realized that Mrs. Curley was free to adopt some other mode of living had she pleased.  Gradually Martie pieced the old woman’s history together; there had been plenty of change, prosperity, and excitement in her life.  She had had seven children, only three of whom were living:  Mary, a prosperous, big matron whose husband, Joe Cunningham, had some exalted position on the Brooklyn police force; Ralph, who was a priest in California; and George, the youngest, a handsome ne’er-do-well of about twenty-five, who was a “heart scald.”  George floated about his own and neighbouring cities, only coming to see his mother when no other refuge offered.

The four children who had died were quite as much in their mother’s thoughts and conversation, and probably more in her prayers, than the living ones.  Of “Curley,” too, Martie heard much.  She was able to picture a cheerful, noisy home, full of shouting, dark, untidy-headed children, with an untidy-headed servant, a scatter-brained mother, and an unexacting father in charge.  “Curley” usually went to sleep on the sofa after dinner, and Mrs. Curley’s sister, Mrs. Royce, with her children, or her sister-in-law, “Mrs. Dan,” with hers, came over to pick up the Curleys on the way to a Mission sermon, a church concert, or a meeting of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Saint Vincent de Paul.

“...  Or else maybe the priest would step in,” said Mrs. Curley, remembering these stirring days, “or often I’d take Mollie or Katie--God rest her!—­and go over to see the Sisters.  But many a night there’d be sickness in the house—­Curley had two cousins and an aunt that died on us—­and then I’d be there sitting up with the medicines, and talking with this one and that.  I was never one to run away from sickness, nor death either for that matter.  I’m a great hand with death in the house; there’s no sole to my foot when I’m needed!  I’ll never forget the day that I went over to poor Aggie Lemmon’s house—­she was a lovely woman who lived round the corner from me.  Well, I hadn’t been thinking she looked very well for several weeks, do you see?—­and I passed the remark to my brother Thomas’s wife—­God rest her—–­”

A reminiscence would follow.  Martie never tired of them.  Whether she was held, just now, in the peaceful, unquestioning mood that precedes a serious strain on mind and body, or whether her old hostess really had had an unusually interesting experience, she did not then or ever decide.  She only knew that she liked to sit playing solitaire in the hot evenings, under a restricted cone of light, with Mrs. Curley sitting in the darkness by the window, watching the lively street, fanning herself comfortably, and pouring forth the history of the time Curley gave poor Ralph a “crule” beating, or of the day Alicia Curley died in convulsions at the age of three.