It was a shabby room, and necessarily crowded, but it was bright, and its one window gave an attractive view of little tree-shaded backyards below, where small tragedies and comedies were continually being enacted by dogs and babies and cats and the crude little maids of the neighborhood.  Susan enjoyed these thoroughly, and she and Georgie also liked to watch the girl in the house just behind theirs, who almost always forgot to draw the shades when she lighted her gas.  Whatever this unconscious neighbor did they found very amusing.

“Oh, look, Georgie, she’s changing her slippers.  Don’t miss this—­ She must be going out to-night!” Susan would quiver with excitement until her cousin joined her at the window.

“Well, I wish you could have seen her trying her new hat on to-day!” Georgie would contribute.  And both girls would kneel at the window as long as the bedroom in the next house was lighted.  “Gone down to meet that man in the light overcoat,” Susan would surmise, when the light went out, and if she and Georgie, hurrying to the bakery, happened to encounter their neighbor, they had much difficulty in suppressing their mirth.

To-night the room that the cousins shared was empty, and Susan threw her hat and coat over the foot of the large, lumpy wooden bed that seemed to take up at least one-half of the floor-space.  She sat down on the side of the bed, feeling the tension of the day relax, and a certain lassitude creep over her.  An old magazine lay nearby on a chair, she reached for it, and began idly to re-read it.

Beside the bed and Georgie’s cot, there was a walnut bureau in the room, two chairs and one rocking chair, and a washstand.  One the latter was a china basin, half-full of cold, soapy water, a damp towel was spread upon the pitcher that stood beside it on the floor.  The wet pink soap, lying in a blue saucer, scented the room.  On the bureau were combs and brushes, powders and cold creams, little brass and china trays filled with pins and buttons, and an old hand-mirror, in a loosened, blackened silver mounting.  There was a glazed paper candy-box with hairpins in it, and a little liqueur glass, with “Hotel Netherlands” written upon it in gold, held wooden collar buttons and odd cuff-links.  A great many hatpins, some plain, some tarnished and ornate, all bent, were stuck into a little black china boot.  A basket of china and gold wire was full of combings, some dotted veils were folded into squares, and pinned into the wooden frame of the mirror, and the mirror itself was thickly rimmed with cards and photographs and small souvenirs of all sorts, that had been stuck in between the glass and the frame.  There were dance cards with dangling tiny pencils on tasseled cords, and score cards plastered with tiny stars.  There were calling cards, and newspaper clippings, and tintypes taken of young people at the beach or the Chutes.  A round pilot-biscuit, with a dozen names written on it in pencil, was tied with a midshipman’s hat-ribbon, there were wooden plates and champagne corks, and toy candy-boxes in the shapes of guitars and fire-crackers.  Miss Georgie Lancaster, at twenty-eight, was still very girlish and gay, and she shared with her mother and sisters the curious instinctive acquisitiveness of the woman who, powerless financially and incapable of replacing, can only save.