“She didn’t happen to mention where she was going, did she, Janet?” Hannah would query, when she had finished her work and put on her spectacles to read the Banner.

“To the movies, I suppose,” Janet would reply.  Although well aware that her sister indulged in other distractions, she thought it useless to add to Hannah’s disquietude.  And if she had little patience with Lise, she had less with the helpless attitude of her parents.

“Well,” Hannah would add, “I never can get used to her going out nights the way she does, and with young men and women I don’t know anything about.  I wasn’t brought up that way.  But as long as she’s got to work for a living I guess there’s no help for it.”

And she would glance at Edward.  It was obviously due to his inability adequately to cope with modern conditions that his daughters were forced to toil, but this was the nearest she ever came to reproaching him.  If he heard, he acquiesced humbly, and in silence:  more often than not he was oblivious, buried in the mazes of the Bumpus family history, his papers spread out on the red cloth of the dining-room table, under the lamp.  Sometimes in his simplicity and with the enthusiasm that demands listeners he would read aloud to them a letter, recently received from a distant kinsman, an Alpheus Bumpus, let us say, who had migrated to California in search of wealth and fame, and who had found neither.  In spite of age and misfortunes, the liberal attitude of these western members of the family was always a matter of perplexity to Edward.

“He tells me they’re going to give women the ballot,—­doesn’t appear to be much concerned about his own womenfolks going to the polls.”

“Why shouldn’t they, if they want to?” Janet would exclaim, though she had given little thought to the question.

Edward would mildly ignore this challenge.

“He has a house on what they call Russian Hill, and he can watch the vessels as they come in from Japan,” he would continue in his precise voice, emphasizing admirably the last syllables of the words “Russian,” “vessels,” and “Japan.”  “Wouldn’t you like to see the letter?”

To do Hannah justice, although she was quite incapable of sharing his passion, she frequently feigned an interest, took the letter, presently handing it on to Janet who, in deciphering Alpheus’s trembling calligraphy, pondered over his manifold woes.  Alpheus’s son, who had had a good position in a sporting goods establishment on Market Street, was sick and in danger of losing it, the son’s wife expecting an addition to the family, the house on Russian Hill mortgaged.  Alpheus, a veteran of the Civil War, had been for many years preparing his reminiscences, but the newspapers nowadays seemed to care nothing for matters of solid worth, and so far had refused to publish them....  Janet, as she read, reflected that these letters invariably had to relate tales of failures, of disappointed hopes; she wondered at her father’s perennial interest in failures,—­provided they were those of his family; and the next evening, as he wrote painfully on his ruled paper, she knew that he in turn was pouring out his soul to Alpheus, recounting, with an emotion by no means unpleasurable, to this sympathetic but remote relative the story of his own failure!