use to keep
them young."

"How about Sunday morning?" Hertha queried.

"Sundays you won't be getting up until it's time for dinner."

And while Kathleen's prophecy was in part true, while the increasingly
cold weather and the hard hours made the morning nap imperative, Hertha
did more for their little home than her companion had expected. She made
curtains for the windows; she bought occasional attractive magazines;
she framed a striking picture taken from the Sunday supplement. It was a
landscape by Inness of great trees with heavy foliage, the clouds massed
as though about to break in storm. Before a month was over the tenement
rooms took on a deeper look of home.

The life within the rooms was very quiet. Kathleen's work made her hours
most irregular. As an "experienced nurse" she was rarely on a case for
more than two or three days and nights, so poor were the people among
whom she worked. She had no diploma and was not recognized by the
profession. During one year of her hard life she had acted as nurse in a
woman's prison, but the time had never come when she could afford to go
into a hospital. "And now it's too late; I'm too old," she would
explain, "and besides I haven't got the education. Schooling don't go
with starting in at the mill with your dresses at your knees, and your
hands so little you can hardly manage the machine." Her hands were still
small and well formed, and she had a pleasant touch. She was skillful at
massage, and in the winter season had a few society women whose surplus
flesh she vigorously rubbed off and whose faces she smoothed into
comparative youth. Leaving the sumptuous house of some wealthy woman,
she would hurry to a dark room in a tenement, where the cold and poverty
made her eyes flame with anger, to spend the night by an ailing child,
ministering with patience and even merriment to its many wants. And as
her life carried her from one extreme to another, so she herself varied
in mood, from the smiling, youthful looking woman whom Hertha had seen
and loved from the first to an intense, angry iconoclast who found life
for the many both cruel and unjust. She never ministered and brought to
health the one ailing without remembering the ten others who were
needlessly suffering and whom she could not aid. "I know that my work is
nothing but putting courtplaster on a cancer," she would say to Hertha
savagely as she came back from a home where she had coaxed the growing
boy back to li