that, in her father’s study from which he had fled with his morning cigar, for two hours Edith held school for her children, trying her best to be patient and clear, with text-books she had purchased from their former schools uptown.  For two severe hours, shutting the world all out of her head, she tried to teach them about it.  At eleven, their nerves on edge like her own, she sent them outdoors “to play,” intrusting the small ones to Betsy and George, who took them to Washington Square nearby with strict injunctions to keep them away from all other children.  No doubt there were “nice” children there, but she herself could not be along to distinguish the “nice” from the “common”—­for until one o’clock she was busy at home, bathing the baby and making the beds, and then hurrying to the kitchen to pasteurize the baby’s milk and keep a vigilant oversight on the cooking of the midday meal.  And the old cook’s growing resentment made it far from easy.

After luncheon, thank heaven, came their naps.  And all afternoon, while again they went out, Edith would look over their wardrobes, mend and alter and patch and contrive how to make last winter’s clothes look new.  At times she would drop her work in her lap and stare wretchedly before her.  This was what she had never known; this was what made life around her grim and hard, relentless, frightening; this was what it was to be poor.  How it changed the whole city of New York.  Behind it, the sinister cause of it all, she thought confusedly now and then of the Great Death across the sea, of the armies, smoking battle-fields, the shrieks of the dying, the villages blazing, the women and children flying away.  But never for more than a moment.  The war was so remote and dim.  And soon she would turn back again to her own beloved children, whose lives, so full of happiness, so rich in promise hitherto, were now so cramped and thwarted.  Each day was harder than the last.  It was becoming unbearable!

No, they must go back to school.  But how to manage it?  How?  How?  It would cost eight hundred dollars, and this would take nearly all the money she would be able to secure by the sale of her few possessions.  And then what?  What of sickness, and the other contingencies which still lay ahead of her?  How old her father seemed, these days!  In his heavy shock of hair the flecks of white had doubled in size, were merging one into the other, and his tall, stooping, massive frame had lost its look of ruggedness.  Suppose, suppose....  Her breath came fast.  Was his life insured, she wondered.

On such afternoons, in the upstairs room as the dusk crept in and deepened, she would bend close to her sewing—­planning, planning, planning.  At last she would hear the children trooping merrily into the house.  And making a very real effort, which at times was in truth heroic, to smile, she would rise and light the gas, would welcome them gaily and join in their chatter and bustle about on the countless tasks of washing them, getting their suppers, undressing the small ones and hearing their prayers.  With smiling good-night kisses she would tuck her two babies into their cribs.  Afterward, just for a moment or two, she would linger under the gas jet, her face still smiling, for a last look.  A last good-night.  Then darkness.