under the round table, and there
should be a drawing-room papered in clean tans and curtained in cream
colour, with an upright piano and comfortable chairs. The ugly old
storeroom off the kitchen must be her mother's; it must have new windows
cut, and nothing but what was new and pretty must go in there. And the
kitchen should have blue-and-white linoleum, with curtains and shining
tinware; there must be the gleam of scrubbed white woodwork, the shine
of polished metal. It was a big kitchen, the invalid might still like to
have her chair there.

The basement's big, unused front room must be finished in durable
burlaps and grass matting for Uncle Chester; there must be a bath
upstairs; two rooms for Aunt May and the girls, one for Grandma, one for
Julia and little Anna.

So much for externals. But what of changing the tenants to suit the
house? Would time and patience ever transform Mrs. Torney into a busy,
useful woman? Would Geraldine and Regina develop into hopeless
incompetents like Marguerite, or pay Julia for all her trouble by
becoming happy and helpful and contented?

Time must show. Only the days and the years would answer the question
that Julia asked of the fire. There must be patience, there must be
endless effort, there would be times of bitterest discouragement and
depression. And in the end?

In the end there would only be, at best, one family, out of millions of
other families, saved from unnecessary suffering. There would be only
one household lifted from the weight of incompetence and wretchedness
that burdened the world. There would be no miracle, no appreciation, no
gratitude.

"But--who knows?" mused Julia. "It may save Geraldine and Regina from
lives like Rita's, and bitterness like Muriel's and Evelyn's. It may
save them from clouding their lives as I did mine. Rita's children, too,
who knows what a clean and sweet ideal--held before them, may do for
them? And poor Chess, who has been wronged all his life, and my poor
little grandmother, and Mama--"

It was the thought of her mother that turned the scale. Julia thought of
the dirty blankets and the soggy pillow that furnished the invalid's
chair, of the treat that a simple bowl of oyster soup seemed to the
failing appetite.

"And I can do it!" she said to herself. "It will be hard for months and
months, and it will be hard now to make Aunt Sanna see that I am right;
but I can do it!" She looked about the luxurious room, and smiled a
littl