What made Grandma mad was that Aunt Lois would peek out and see who was there and go right back in the house, which hurt Mr. Sweeney’s feelings so that he would lift his hat and go on his way with dignity. It made Grandma mad to be teased by her daughter Daisy as if Mr. Sweeney was her beau, when she was only trying to interest him in Lois. Even Marcia disapproved of her mother’s ridicule of Mr. Sweeney, her defense being a matter of bribery largely, since Mr. Sweeney had given her a half dollar one day for bringing him a glass of water. Grandma discussed business in a low secret voice with Mr. Sweeney, and her plans to run a rooming house in Cleveland as her very clever friend, Mrs. Carmel, had advised. “It will leave my daughter very lonesome, Mr. Sweeney,” Grandma confessed. “I trust you as the person she admires more than anyone else to sort of look after her. She’s young and inexperienced, you know.” But in spite of Aunt Lois’s supposed reverence for Mr. Sweeney, she always ran away when he was there and scolded Grandma afterward, until Grandma would get red-faced and go upstairs to write other relations or—better still—Mrs. Carmel.

One day the children’s mother got sick and all of them, even Florrie, were brought to Grandma’s to stay, while Aunt Lois went to the Fourth Street house to nurse her sister. It was a wonderful vacation. Lena played hooky from school and Grandma let them eat cookies and milk every meal with bananas and oranges in between. They could play “Run, Sheepie, Run,” in the streets after dark with the neighbor children, and Florrie stayed up till she fell asleep of her own accord and threw up unheeded after every cookie. The teachers had fun, too, for Grandma let them have beaux all over the house at all hours and cook fudge late at night.

“My daughter Daisy is a very sick girl,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll have to ask you ladies to help me with the house while Lois is nursing her.”

The children could empty all the drawers and trunks they liked, dress up, play opera house—anything. They got out the family album bound in green plush with an inset diamond-shaped mirror and a tasseled gold lock, and one day Grandma patiently went over the whole family gallery for them. For instance, this pretty, full-cheeked, curly-haired brunette with the lace bertha and fan was Grandma’s firstborn who died at the Chicago World’s Fair. This plump little girl, eager, laughing, with a ball held up in her hand, was not a playmate for you at all but your own great-grandmother who was to grow up to have four babies, one of them stolen by Indians, two of the others dead. This smiling handsome young man in the high collar, checked vest, and thick curly black hair was the great-uncle who ended up insane, tied to a post and chain in an asylum; he was Great-Uncle Samuel and he had been a postman leaving one family in Rhode Island to start another in Massachusetts. “Amnesia, they call it now,” said Grandma. “He left your Great-Aunt Nell and all the children and was gone thirteen years, forgetting his name and home. When he remembered he came back and took a razor to his wife and children, so they locked him away.”