“Father did a great deal, too, and did it much better than you could expect from a man.  But, come, I’m mistress of this small fraction of the venerable mansion till after breakfast, and then, mamma, I’ll put the baton of rule in your hands.  I’ve burned my fingers and spoiled my complexion over the stove, and I don’t intend that a cold breakfast shall be the result.”

“Millie,” cried Belle, rushing out of the second room, which she had inspected in her lightning-like way before greeting her sister, “our room is lovely.  You are a gem, an onyx, a fickle wild rose.  It’s all splendid—­a perpetual picnic place, to which we’ll bring our own provisions and cook ’em our own way.  No boss biddies in this establishment.  It’s ever so much better than I expected after you once get here; but as the hymn goes, ’How dark and dismal is the way!’”

It was with difficulty that the children, wild over the novelty of it all, could be settled quietly at the table.  It was the family’s first meal in a tenement-house.  The father’s eye grew moist as he looked around his board and said, deep in his heart, “Never did a sweeter, fairer group grace a table in this house, although it has stood more than a century.  If for their sakes I cannot be a man—­”

“Martin,” began his wife, her delicate features flushing a little, “before we partake of this our first meal I want you all to join me in your hearts while I say from the depths of mine, God bless our home.”

An hour later, as he went down-town, Mr. Jocelyn finished his sentence.  “If for the sake of such a wife and such children I cannot stop, I’m damned.”

CHAPTER XVI

BELLE AND MILDRED

The cosmopolitan bachelor living in apartments knows far more of Sanscrit than of a domestic woman’s feelings as she explores the place she must call her home.  It may be a palace or it may be but two rooms in a decaying tenement, but the same wistful, intent look will reveal one of the deepest needs of her nature.  Eve wept not so much for the loss of Eden as for the loss of home—­the familiar place whose homeliest objects had become dear from association.  The restless woman who has no home-hunger, no strong instinct to make a place which shall be a refuge for herself and those she loves, is not the woman God created.  She is the product of a sinister evolution; she is akin to the birds that will not build nests, but take possession of those already constructed, ousting the rightful occupants.

Mrs. Jocelyn and Mildred were unperverted; they were womanly in every fibre, and the interest with which they planned, consulted, and dwelt upon each detail of their small household economy is beyond my power to interpret.  They could have made the stateliest mansion in the city homelike; they did impart to their two poor rooms the essential elements of a home.  It was a place which no one could enter without involuntary respect for the occupants, although aware of nothing concerning them except their poverty.