She thought of the Shotwell Street house, and wondered what had attracted her grandfather and grandmother to it, forty years ago.  She tried to see her mother there, a slender, dark-haired child; tried to imagine her aunt as young and fresh and hopeful.  Had the rooms been dark and dirty even then?  Julia feared so; in none of her mother’s reminiscences was there ever any tenderness or affection for early memories of Shotwell Street.  Four young people had gone out from that house, nearly thirty years ago, how badly equipped to meet life!

Julia’s own earliest recollections centred in it.  She remembered herself as an elaborately dressed little child, shaking out her little flounces for her grandmother’s admiration, and having large hats tied over her flushed sticky face and tumbled curls.  She remembered that, instead of the row of cheap two-story flats that now faced it, there had been a vacant lot across the street then, where horses sometimes galloped.  She remembered the Chester of those days, a pimply, constantly smoking youth, who gave her little pictures of actresses from his cigarette boxes, and other little pictures that, being held to a strong light, developed additional figures and lettering.  He called her “Miss O’Farrell of Page Street” sometimes, and liked to poke her plump little person until she giggled herself almost into hysterics.

Still dreaming of the old times, she reached her hotel, and while Ellie settled the baby into her waiting crib, Julia sat down before a fire, her slippered feet to the comfortable coals, her loose mandarin robe deliciously warm and restful after the tiring day.

“You want the lights, Mrs. Studdiford?” asked Ellie, tiptoeing in from the next room.

“Oh, no, thank you!” Julia said.  “I’ll just sit here for a while, and then go to bed.”

Ellie went softly out; the clock struck nine—­ten—­eleven.  Against the closely curtained windows the rain still fell with a softened hiss, the coals broke, flamed up, died down to a rosy glow.  Still Julia sat, sunk in her deep chair, musing.

She saw the Shotwell Street house changed, and made, for the first time in its years of tenancy, into a home.  There must be paint outside, clean paint, there must be a garden, with a brick path and rose bushes, where a little girl might take her first stumbling steps, and where spring would make a brave showing in green and white for the eyes of tired homegoers.

Indoors there should be a cool little orderly dining-room, with blue china on its shelves, and a blue rug under the round table, and there should be a drawing-room papered in clean tans and curtained in cream colour, with an upright piano and comfortable chairs.  The ugly old storeroom off the kitchen must be her mother’s; it must have new windows cut, and nothing but what was new and pretty must go in there.  And the kitchen should have blue-and-white linoleum, with curtains and shining tinware; there must be the gleam of scrubbed white woodwork, the shine of polished metal.  It was a big kitchen, the invalid might still like to have her chair there.