“But we don’t do the slightest good this way,” Miss Toland sometimes said with asperity.  “We merely amuse them; it goes no further.  Now, next time, we will make it an absolute condition that every child has a bath before coming, and wears clean clothes!”

“But we made that a condition this time, and it didn’t do any good.”

“Very well.  Next time”—­flushed at the merest hint of opposition, Miss Toland would speak with annoyance—­“next time every child who hasn’t had a bath will go straight into that tub, I don’t care if the performance doesn’t begin until midnight!”

“Well,” Julia would concede tolerantly.  She very speedily learned not to dispute these vigorous resolutions.  Miss Toland always forgot them before morning; she would not have considered them seriously in any case.

“We are the laughing-stock of the city,” she would frequently say with bitterness, upon being informed that more thimbles were needed, or that the girls hated to sew on the ugly gray ginghams.  But sometimes Julia found her giving out candy and five-cent pieces, without regard for the girls’ merits and achievements, for the mere pleasure of hearing their thanks.

Or sometimes, when for any reason the attendance upon the sewing classes was poor, Miss Toland bought herself a new blank book, dated it fiercely, and proceeded to ransack the neighbourhood for children in a house-to-house canvass.  Julia and she would take a car into Mission Street, eat their dinner at the Colonial dining-room, where all sorts of wholesome dairy dishes were consumed by hungry hundreds every night, and where a white-clad man turned batter cakes in the window.

“They do that everywhere in New York,” said Miss Toland, thereby thrilling Julia.  “What, d’you like New York?” asked the older woman.

“I’ve never seen it!” Julia breathed.

“Well, some day we’ll go on—­study methods there.  Spring’s the time,” said Miss Toland, raising gold-rimmed eyeglasses to study the grimy and spotted menu.  “Spring afternoons on the Avenue, or driving in the Park—­it’s quite wonderful!  I see they have chicken pie specially starred, thirty-five cents; shall we try that?”

After the meal the canvassing began, Miss Toland doing all the talking, while Julia stared about the small, stuffy interiors, and smiled at the babies and old women.  Miss Toland jotted down in her book all the details she gathered in each house, and only stopped in her quest when the hour and the darkened houses reminded her that the evening was flying.

This might keep up every free evening for two weeks; it would end as suddenly as it began, and Miss Toland enter upon a lazy and luxurious phase.  She would spend whole mornings and even afternoons in bed, reading and dozing, and fresh from a hot bath at four o’clock, would summon her assistant and make a suggestion or two.

“Julia, suppose we go down to the Palace for tea?”