se 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 aga