“No—­I don’t believe there is.”

“What’s the chances on a salad?”

“Oh, no, George—­that takes lettuce, you know.  My goodness!” And Emeline would put her elbows on the table and yawn, the rouge showing on her high cheek bones, her eyes glittering, her dark hair still pressed down where her hat had lain.  “My goodness!” she would exclaim impatiently, “haven’t you had enough, George?  You had steak, and potatoes, and corn—­why don’t you eat your corn?”

“What’s the chances on a cup of tea?” George might ask, seizing a half slice of bread, and doubling an ounce of butter into it, with his great thumb on the blade of his knife.

“You can have all the tea you want, but you’ll have to use condensed milk!”

At this George would say “Damn!” and take himself and his evening paper to the armchair in the front window.  When Emeline would go in, after a cursory disposition of the dishes, she would find Julia curled in his arms, and George sourly staring over the little silky head.

“It’s up to you, and it’s your job, and it makes me damn sick to come home to such a dirty pen as this!” George sometimes burst out.  “Look at that—­and look at that—­look at that mantel!”

“Well—­well—­well!” Emeline would answer sharply, putting the mantel straight, or commencing to do so with a sort of lazy scorn.  “I can’t do everything!”

“Other men go home to decent dinners,” George would pursue sullenly; “their wives aren’t so darn lazy and selfish—­”

Such a start as this always led to a bitter quarrel, after which Emeline, trembling with anger, would clear a corner of the cluttered drawing-room table and take out a shabby pack of cards for solitaire, and George would put Julia to bed.  All her life Julia Page remembered these scenes and these bedtimes.

Her father sometimes tore the tumbled bed apart, and made it up again, smoothing the limp sheets with clumsy fingers, and talking to Julia, while he worked, of little girls who had brothers and sisters, and who lived in the country, and hung their stockings up on Christmas Eve.  Emeline pretended not to notice either father or daughter at these times, although she could have whisked Julia into bed in half the time it took George to do it, and was really very kind to the child when George was not there.

When George asked the little girl to find her hairbrush, and blundered over the buttons of her nightgown, Emeline hummed a sprightly air.  She never bore resentment long.

“What say we go out later and get something to eat, George?” she would ask, when George tiptoed out of the bedroom and shut the folding door behind him.  But several hours of discomfort were not to be so lightly dismissed by George.

“Maybe,” he would briefly answer.  And invariably he presently muttered something about asking “Cass” for the time, and so went down to the saloon of “J.  Cassidy,” just underneath his own residence.