and selfish--"

Such a start as this always led to a bitter quarrel, after which
Emeline, trembling with anger, would clear a corner of the cluttered
drawing-room table and take out a shabby pack of cards for solitaire,
and George would put Julia to bed. All her life Julia Page remembered
these scenes and these bedtimes.

Her father sometimes tore the tumbled bed apart, and made it up again,
smoothing the limp sheets with clumsy fingers, and talking to Julia,
while he worked, of little girls who had brothers and sisters, and who
lived in the country, and hung their stockings up on Christmas Eve.
Emeline pretended not to notice either father or daughter at these
times, although she could have whisked Julia into bed in half the time
it took George to do it, and was really very kind to the child when
George was not there.

When George asked the little girl to find her hairbrush, and blundered
over the buttons of her nightgown, Emeline hummed a sprightly air. She
never bore resentment long.

"What say we go out later and get something to eat, George?" she would
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