once a month went over to Sausalito, to spoil the old doctor with her affectionate attentions, hold long conferences with their mother on the subject of the girls’ love affairs, and fall into deep talks with Richie—­perhaps the happiest talks in her life, for Richie, whose mind and body had undergone for long years the exquisite discipline of pain, was delightfully unexpected in his views, and his whole lean, ungainly frame vibrated with the eager joy of expressing them.

Perhaps once a month, too, Julia went to see her own mother, calls which always left her definitely depressed.  Emeline was becoming more and more crippled with rheumatism, the old grandmother was now the more brisk of the two.  May’s two younger girls, Muriel and Geraldine, were living there now, as Marguerite and Evelyn had done; awkward, dark, heavy-faced girls who attended the High School.  Julia’s astonishing rise in life had necessarily affected her relatives, but much less, she realized in utter sickness of spirit, than might have been imagined.  She and Jim were paying for the schooling of two of May’s boys, and a substantial check, sent to her mother monthly, supposedly covered the main expenses of the entire household.  Besides this, Chess was working, and paying his mother something every week for board.

It had been Julia’s first confident plan to move the family from the Mission entirely.  There were lovely roomy flats in the Western Addition, or there were sunny houses out toward the end of Sutter Street, where her mother and grandmother would be infinitely more comfortable and more accessible.  She was stunned when her grandmother flatly refused.  Even her mother’s approval of the plan was singularly wavering and half hearted.  Mrs. Cox argued shrilly that they were poor folks, and poor folks were better off not trapesing all over the city, and Emeline added that Ma would feel lost without her backyard and her neighbours, to say nothing of the privilege of bundling up in a flat black bonnet and brown shawl, hot weather or cold, and trotting off to St. Charles’s Church at all hours of the day and night.

“I don’t care, Julie,” Mrs. Page made her daughter exquisitely uncomfortable by saying very formally, “but there’s no girl in God’s world that wouldn’t think of asking her mother to stay with her for a while—­till things got settled, anyway.  You haven’t done it!”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Mama—­” Julia began, but Emeline interrupted her.

“You haven’t done it, Julie, and let me tell you right now, it looks queer.  I’m not the one that says it; every one says it.  I don’t want to force myself where I’m not—­”

“But, Mama dear, we’re only at the hotel now!” Julia protested, feeling a hypocrite.

“I see,” said Emeline, “and I’m not good enough, of course.  I couldn’t meet your friends, of course!” She laughed heartily.  “That’s good!” she said appreciatively.