“Well, why couldn’t Grandpa sit in the kitchen?” the girl asked.  “There’s a better light out here!”

“Catch him doing anything decent,” Evelyn said, and Marguerite added:  “And, Ju, he’ll sit there sometimes just to be mean, and he’ll take his shoes off, and put his socks up—–­”

“And nights he knows we want the parlour he’ll stay in on purpose,” Evelyn supplemented eagerly.

“I wouldn’t stand for it,” Julia asserted.

“Pa’s awfully cranky,” Mrs. Cox said resignedly.  “He’s always been that way!  You cook him corn beef—­that’s the night he wanted pork chops; sometimes he’ll snap your head off if you speak, and others he’ll ask you why you sit around like a mute and don’t talk.  Sometimes, if you ask him for money, he’ll put his hand in his pocket real willing, and other times for weeks he won’t give you a cent!”

“I wouldn’t put up with it,” said Julia again.  “What does he do with his money?”

“Oh, he treats the boys, and sometimes, when he’s drunk, they’ll borrow it off him,” said his wife.  “Pa’s always open-handed with the boys!”

Evelyn, who had washed her coarse, handsome face at the kitchen sink, began now to arrange her hair with a small comb that had been wedged into the sinkboard.  Marguerite, having completed similar operations, offered to walk with Julia to the Mission Street car.

“The worst of Grandpa is this,” said Marguerite, on the way, and Julia glancing sideways under a street lamp surprised an earnest and most winning expression on her cousin’s plain, pale face, “he don’t give Grandma any money, d’you see?—­and that means that Ev and I have to give her pretty much what we get, and so we can’t help Mamma, and that makes me awfully blue.”

“But—­but Uncle Ed’s working, Rita?”

“Pop works when he can, Ju.  Work isn’t ever very steady in his line, you know.  But he don’t drink any more, Mamma says, only—­ there’s five children younger’n we are, you know—­”

“Sure,” said Julia, heavy oppressed.  But Marguerite was cheered at this point by encountering two pimply and embarrassed youths, and Julia, climbing a moment later into a Mission Street car, looked back to see her cousin walking off between the two masculine forms, and heard their loud laughter ring upon the night.

About ten days later, unannounced, Emeline came home, and with her came a stout, red-faced, grayhaired man, in whom Julia was aghast to find her father.  They reached Mrs. Tarbury’s at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and Julia, coming in from a call on a theatrical manager, found them in the dining-room.  George had been very ill, and moved ponderously and slowly.  He looked far older than Julia’s memory of him.  There were sagging red pockets under his eyes, and his heavy jowls were darkened with a day’s growth of gray stubble.  He and Emeline had had a complete reconciliation, and entertained Mrs. Tarbury with the history of their remarriage and an outline of their plans.