“Ma!”

“Not for five weeks.  Well.  But that first night, somebody knocked at my door, and who should it be but my little widow! with her nice little black gown on, and a white apron.  She’d brought me some gruel, and she began to hang up my things and straighten the room.  I asked about dinner, and she said she had helped Ceely and that it was all right.  The relief!  And from that moment she took hold, got a new cook, cleaned house, managed everything!  And how she adored that boy!  I don’t think that, in the seven years that she was with me, Nellie ever spent an evening away from him.  Poor Nellie!  And a witty, sweet woman she was, too, far above that sort of work.  She was taking the public library examinations when she died.  Nellie would have gone a long way.  She was a real little lady.  Billy must be more like his father, I imagine.”

“Oh, now, Ma!” There was always someone to defend Billy.  “Look how good and steady Billy is!”

“Steady, yes, and a dear, dear boy, as we all know.  But—­but very different from what I would wish a son of mine to be!” Mrs. Lancaster would say regretfully.

Susan agreed with her aunt that it was a great pity that a person of Billy’s intelligence should voluntarily grub away in a dirty iron foundry all the days of his youth, associating with the commonest types of laboring men.  A clerkship, an agency, a hundred refined employments in offices would have seemed more suitable, or even a professional vocation of some sort.  But she had in all honesty to admit that Alfred’s disinclination to do anything at all, and Alfred’s bad habits, made Billy’s industry and cleanness and temperance a little less grateful to Mrs. Lancaster than they might otherwise have been.

Alfred tried a great many positions, and lost them all because he could not work, and could not refrain from drinking.  The women of his family called Alfred nothing more unkind than “unfortunate,” and endured the drunkenness, the sullen aftermath, the depression while a new job was being found, and Alfie’s insufferable complacency when the new job was found, with tireless patience and gentleness.  Mary Lou carried Alfie’s breakfast upstairs to his bed, on Sunday mornings, Mrs. Lancaster often gave him an early dinner, and hung over him adoringly while he ate it, because he so hated to dine with the boarders.  Susan loaned him money, Virginia’s prayers were all for him, and Georgie laughed at his jokes and quoted him as if he had been the most model of brothers.  How much they realized of Alfie’s deficiencies, how important the matter seemed to them, even Susan could not guess Mrs. Lancaster majestically forbade any discussion of Alfie.  “Many a boy has his little weakness in early youth,” she said, “Alfie will come out all right!”

She had the same visionary optimism in regarding her daughters’ futures.  The girls were all to marry, of course, and marry well, far above their present station, indeed.