George had promised to send five dollars each week to old Mrs. Cox for Julia’s board, so that her stay in the Mission Street house was agreeable for more than one reason, and her cousins understood perfectly that Julia was to remain idle while they continued to be self-supporting.  They had no room in their crowded lives for envy of the prettier and more fortunate Julia, but Julia vaguely envied them, seeing them start off for work every morning, and joined by other girls and young men as they reached the corner.  Evelyn and Marguerite had each an admirer, and between the romance of their evenings and the thousand little episodes of the factory day, they seemed to find life cheerful enough.

Julia tried, early in her stay, to make the room she shared with her cousins, and her grandmother’s kitchen, a little more attractive.  But the material to her hand was not very easily improved.  In the bare bedroom there was an iron bed, large enough to be fairly comfortable for three tenants, two chairs, a washstand, and a chest of drawers that would not stand straight.  The paper was light, and streaked with dirt and mould, and the bare wooden floor was strewn with paper candy bags and crumpled programs from cheap theatres.  There were no curtains at the two windows, and the blue-green roller shades were faded by the sun.  Not a promising field for a reformer whose ideal was formed on a memory of the Tolands’ guest room!

The kitchen was quite as bad; worse in the sense that while Julia might do as she pleased in the bedroom, her grandmother resented any interference in what old Mrs. Cox regarded as her own domain.  The old woman found nothing amiss in the dirty newspapers that covered the table, the tin of melting grease on the stove, the odds and ends of rags and rope and clothespins and stockings that littered the chairs and floor, the flies that walked on the ceiling and buzzed over the sugar bowl.  Julia quite enraged her on that morning that she essayed to clean a certain wide shelf that, crowded to its last inch, hung over the sink.

“Do you need this, Grandma—­can I throw this away?” the girl said over and over, displaying a nearly empty box of blacking, a moist bag tightly rolled over perhaps a pound of sugar, a broken egg beater, a stopped alarm clock, a bottle of toothache drops, a dog’s old collar, a cracked saucer with a cake of brown soap tightly adhering to it, a few dried onions, a broken comb, the two halves of a broken vase, and a score of similarly assorted small articles.

“Jest don’t meddle with ’em, Julia,” Mrs. Cox said over and over again uneasily.  “I’m going to give all that a thorough cleaning when I get around to it!”

She was obviously relieved when Julia gave the whole thing up as a bad job, and went back to her aimless wandering about the house.  Mrs. Cox never went out except to church, but now and then Julia went down to Mrs. Tarbury’s and vaguely discussed the advisability of taking a theatrical engagement, exactly as if several very definite offers were under consideration.