The basement’s big, unused front room must be finished in durable burlaps and grass matting for Uncle Chester; there must be a bath upstairs; two rooms for Aunt May and the girls, one for Grandma, one for Julia and little Anna.

So much for externals.  But what of changing the tenants to suit the house?  Would time and patience ever transform Mrs. Torney into a busy, useful woman?  Would Geraldine and Regina develop into hopeless incompetents like Marguerite, or pay Julia for all her trouble by becoming happy and helpful and contented?

Time must show.  Only the days and the years would answer the question that Julia asked of the fire.  There must be patience, there must be endless effort, there would be times of bitterest discouragement and depression.  And in the end?

In the end there would only be, at best, one family, out of millions of other families, saved from unnecessary suffering.  There would be only one household lifted from the weight of incompetence and wretchedness that burdened the world.  There would be no miracle, no appreciation, no gratitude.

“But—­who knows?” mused Julia.  “It may save Geraldine and Regina from lives like Rita’s, and bitterness like Muriel’s and Evelyn’s.  It may save them from clouding their lives as I did mine.  Rita’s children, too, who knows what a clean and sweet ideal—­held before them, may do for them?  And poor Chess, who has been wronged all his life, and my poor little grandmother, and Mama—­”

It was the thought of her mother that turned the scale.  Julia thought of the dirty blankets and the soggy pillow that furnished the invalid’s chair, of the treat that a simple bowl of oyster soup seemed to the failing appetite.

“And I can do it!” she said to herself.  “It will be hard for months and months, and it will be hard now to make Aunt Sanna see that I am right; but I can do it!” She looked about the luxurious room, and smiled a little sadly.  “No more of this!” she thought.  And then longing for her husband came with a sick rush.  “Oh, Jimmy!” she whispered, with filling eyes.  “If it was only you and me, my darling!  If we were going anywhere together, to the poorest neighbourhood and the meanest cabin in the world—­how blessed I would be!  How we could work and laugh and plan together, for Anna and the others!” But presently the tears dried on her cheeks.  “Never mind, it will keep me from thinking too hard,” she thought.  “I shall be needed, I shall be busy, and nothing else matters much!”

She got up, and went to one of the great windows that looked down across the city.  The rain was over, dark masses of cloud were breaking and stirring overhead; through their rifts she caught the silver glimmer of the troubled moon.  Across the shadowy band that was the bay a ferryboat, pricked with hundreds of tiny lights, was moving toward the glittering chain of Oakland.  There was a light on Alcatraz, and other nearer lights scattered through the dark masts and dim hulks of the vessels in the harbour below her.