“Lloyd and Elmer—­yes, but they’re home again now,” the old woman pursued.  “May felt dreadful when they went, but I guess she wasn’t so awfully glad to get them back.  Boys make a lot of work.”

“Elmer and Lloyd, and then there was Muriel, and another baby?” Julia asked.

“Muriel and Geraldine, and then the baby, Regina.”

“Has Aunt May seven children?” Julia asked, awed.

Mrs. Cox delayed the brewing of a pot of tea while she counted them with a bony knotted hand.  Then she nodded.  Julia digested the fact in frowning silence.

“Grandma,” said she presently, “did you ever have enough money?”

Mrs. Cox, now drinking her tea from a saucer, smiled toothlessly.

“Oh, sure,” said she, with a cackle of laughter, “Why, there’s nobody knows it, but I’m rich!” But immediately the sorry joke lost flavour.  The old woman sighed, and into her wrinkled face and filmed eyes there came her usual look of patient and unintelligent endurance.  “I’ve never yet had a dollar that didn’t have to do two dollars’ work,” said she, suddenly, in a mighty voice, staring across the kitchen, and lifting one hand as if she were taking an oath.  “I’ve never laid down at night when I wasn’t so tired my back was splitting.  I’ve never had no thanks and no ease—­the sixty years of my life!  There’s some people meant to be rich, Julia, and some that’ll be poor the longest day of their lives, and that’s all there is to it!”

“I know—­but it don’t seem fair,” Julia mused.  She presently went on an errand for her grandmother, and came back with sausages and fresh pulpy bread and large spongy crullers from the grocery.  By this time the windy summer twilight was closing in, and the homegoing labourers and factory hands were filing home through the dirty streets.  Julia found her two cousins in the lamp-lighted kitchen, Evelyn rather heavy and coarse looking, Marguerite reedy and thin, both wearing an unwholesome pallor.  They made a little event of her coming, and the three girls chatted gayly enough throughout the meal, which was eaten at the kitchen table and washed down with strong tea.

Julia’s grandfather, a gnarled old man in a labourer’s rough clothes, who reeked of whiskey, mumbled his meal in silence, and afterward went into the room known as the parlour, snarling as he went that some one must come in and light his lamp.  Julia went in with Evelyn to the rather pitiful room:  a red rug was on the floor, and there were two chairs and a cheap little table, besides the big chair in which the old man settled himself.

“Ain’t he going out, Grandma?” said Evelyn, returning to the kitchen, and exchanging a rueful look with Marguerite.

“Well, I thought he was!” Mrs. Cox made a pilgrimage to the parlour door, and returned confident.  “He’ll go out!” she said reassuringly.

“Comp’ny coming?” Julia asked smilingly.  The other girls giggled and looked at each other.