ask, when George tiptoed out of the bedroom and shut the folding door
behind him. But several hours of discomfort were not to be so lightly
dismissed by George.

"Maybe," he would briefly answer. And invariably he presently muttered
something about asking "Cass" for the time, and so went down to the
saloon of "J. Cassidy," just underneath his own residence.

Emeline, alone, would brood resentfully over her cards. That was the way
of it: men could run off to saloons, while she, pretty and young, and
with the love of life still strong in her veins, might as well be dead
and buried! Bored and lonely, she would creep into bed beside Julia,
after turning the front-room light down to a bead, and flinging over the
"bed lounge," upon which George spent the night, the musty sheets and
blankets and the big soggy pillows.

But George, meanwhile, would have found warmth, brightness,
companionship, and good food. The drink that was his passport to all
these good things was the least of them in his eyes. George did not care
particularly for drink, but he usually came home the worse for it on
these occasions, and Emeline had a real foundation for her furious
harangues in the morning. She would scold while she carried him in hot
coffee or chopped ice, scold while she crimped her hair and covered her
face with a liquid bleach, scold as she jerked Julia's little bonnet on
the child's lovely mane, and depart, with a final burst of scolding and
a bang of the door.

One day Emeline came in to find George at home, ill. She had said
good-bye to him only the day before, for what was supposedly a week, and
was really concerned to find him back so soon, shivering and mumbling,