catching
glimpses of Julia only between the many claims of the daughter's day.

More than this, Jim would not hear of such a visit; it never even came
to a discussion between husband and wife; he would have been frankly as
much surprised as horrified at the idea. So Julia did what was left to
her, for her mother: listened patiently to long complaints, paid bills,
and supplemented Jim's generous cheque with many a gold piece pressed
into her mother's hand or slipped into her grandmother's dreadful old
shopping-bag. She carried off her young cousins to equip them with
winter suits and sensible shoes, aware all the while that their
high-heeled slippers and flimsy, cheap silk dresses, the bangles that
they slipped over dirty little hands, and the fancy combs they pushed
into their untidy hair, were infinitely more prized by them.

The Shotwell Street house was still close and stuffy, the bedrooms as
dark and horrible as Julia remembered them, and no financial aid did
more than temporarily soften the family's settled opinion that poor
folks were poor folks, and predestined to money trouble. Julia knew that
when the clothes she bought her cousins grew dirty they would not be
cleaned; she knew that her grandmother had never taken a tub bath in her
life and rather scorned the takers of tub baths; she knew that such a
thing as the weekly washing of clothes, the transformation of dirty
linen into piles of fragrant whiteness, never took place in the Shotwell
Street house. Mrs. Cox indeed liked to keep a tub full of gray suds
standing in the kitchen, and occasionally souse in it one of her calico
wrappers, or a shirt waist belonging to the girls. These would be dried
on a rope stretched across the kitchen, and sooner or later pressed with
one of the sad irons that Julia remembered as far back as she remembered
anything; rough-looking old irons, one with a broken handle, all with
the figure seven stamped upon them with a mould. Mrs. Cox had several
ironholders drifting about the kitchen, folds of dark cloth that had
been so often wet and singed that the covering had split, and the folded
newspaper inside showed its burned edges, but she never could find one
when she wanted it, and usually improvised a new one from a grocery bag
or the folds of her apron, and so burned her veined old knotted hands.

Julia came soon to see that her actual presence did them small good, and
did herself real harm, and so, somewhat thankfully, began to