visit the daughter in Brooklyn fell ill, and it was mid-March before the mother came home again.  By that time the trembling Martie had weathered several storms, had rented the long-vacant front room, and was more brisk and happy than she had been for months, than she had ever been perhaps.  So the arrangement drifted along.  There was no talk of a salary then, but in time Martie came to ask for such money as she needed—­for Teddy’s rompers, for gingham dresses for summer, for stationery and stamps—­and it was always generously accorded.

“Get good things while you’re about it,” Mrs. Curley would say.  “You buy for the ragman when you buy trash.  This lad here,” she would indicate the splendid Teddy, with his loose dark curls and his creamy skin, “he wants to look elegant, so that the girls will run after him!”

Martie felt more free to obey her because the business was in a steadily improving condition.  This fancy for keeping a few “paying guests” had become a sort of expensive luxury for the solitary woman, whose children no longer needed her, and who would not live with any of them.  Mrs. Curley was not entirely dependent upon her boarding-house, but she had never been reconciled to the actual loss of money in the business.  She liked to have other persons about, she having no definite interests of her own, and the new arrangement suited her perfectly:  an attractive young woman to help her, a baby to lend a familiar air to the table, and money enough to pay all bills and have something left over.

Amazingly, the money flowed in.  Martie told them one night at dinner that she had always fancied a boarding-house was a place where a slap-heeled woman climbed bleak stairs to tell starving geniuses that their rent was overdue.  Mrs. Curley had laughed comfortably at the picture.

“You can always make money feeding people,” she had asserted.  John had given Martie a serious look after his laugh.

“Geniuses don’t have to starve,” he had submitted thoughtfully.

“There’s always plenty of work in the world, if people will do it!” Adele had added.  “Dear me, I often wonder if the people who talk charity—­charity—­charity—­realize that it’s all two thirds laziness and dirt.  I don’t care how poor I was, I know that I would keep my little house nice; you don’t have to have money to do that!  But you’ll always hear this talk of the unemployed—­when any employer will tell you the hard thing is to get trustworthy men!  The other day Ethel was asking me to join some society or other—­take tickets for an actors’ benefit, I think it was—­and I begged to be excused.  I told her we didn’t have any money to spare for that sort of thing!  Genius, indeed!  Why don’t they get jobs?”

“Jobs in a furniture store, eh, John?” Martie smiled.  The man answered her smile sturdily.

“It isn’t so rotten!” he said.