Julia, thumping an iron, would answer with cool common sense:

"Well, if I do, I want to tell you right now, Mama, I'll treat him a
good deal better than you did!"

"Oh, you'll be a wonder," Emeline would concede good-naturedly.

At very long intervals Emeline dressed herself and her daughter as
elaborately as possible, and went out into the Mission to see her
parents. With the singular readiness to change the known discomfort for
the unknown, characteristic of their class, the various young members of
the family had all gone away now, and lonely old Mrs. Cox, a shrivelled
little shell of a woman at sixty-five, always had a warm welcome for her
oldest daughter and her beautiful grandchild. She would limp about her
bare, uninviting little rooms, complaining of her husband's increasing
meanness and of her own physical ills, while with gnarled, twisted old
hands she filled a "Rebecca" teapot of cheap brown glaze, or cut into a
fresh loaf of "milk bread."

"D'ye see George at all now, Emeline?"

"Not to speak to, Mom. But"--and Emeline would lay down the little
mirror in which she was studying her face--"but the Rosenthal children
say that there's a man who's _always_ hanging about the lower doorway, and
that once he gave Hannah----"

And so on and on. Mrs. Cox was readily convinced that George, repentant,
was unable to keep away from the neighbourhood of his one and only love.
Julia, dreaming over her thick cup of strong tea, granted only a polite,