Deborah came into the room, and at once the whole atmosphere changed. Her niece sprang up delightedly. "Why, Auntie, how lovely you look!" she exclaimed. And Roger eyed Deborah in surprise. Though she did not believe in mourning, she had been wearing dark gowns of late to avoid hurting Edith's feelings. But to-night she had donned bright colors instead; her dress was as near décolleté as anything that Deborah wore, and there was a band of dull blue velvet bound about her hair. "Thanks, dearie," she said, smiling. "Shall we go in to dinner now?" she added to her father. "Edith said not to wait for her--and I'll have to be off rather early this evening." "What is it to-night?" he inquired. "A big meeting at Cooper Union." And at dinner she went on to say that in her five schools the neighborhood clubs had combined to hold this meeting, and she herself was to preside. At once her young niece was all animation. "Oh, I wish I could go and hear you!" she sighed. "Afraid you can't, Betsy," her aunt replied. And at this, with an instinctive glance toward the door where her mother would soon come in to stop by her mere presence all such conversation, Elizabeth eagerly threw out one inquiry after the other, pell mell. "How on earth do you do it?" she wanted to know. "How do you get a speech ready, Aunt Deborah--how much of it do you write out ahead? Aren't you just the least bit nervous--now, I mean--this minute? And how will you feel on the platform? _What on earth do you do with your feet?_" As the girl bent forward there with her gaze fixed ardently on her aunt, her grandfather thought in half comic dismay, "Lord, now she'll want to be a great speaker--like her aunt. And she will tell her mother so!" "What's the meeting all about?" he inquired. And Deborah began to explain. In her five schools the poverty was rapidly becoming worse. Each week more children stayed away or came to school ragged and unkempt, some without any overcoats, small pitiful mites wearing shoes so old as barely to stick on their feet. And when the teachers and visitors followed these children into their homes they found bare, dirty, chilly rooms where the little folk shivered and wailed for food and the mothers looked distracted, gaunt and sullen and half crazed. Over three hundred thousand workers were idle in the city. Meanwhile, to make matters worse, half the money from uptown which had gone in former years into work for the tenements was going over to Belgium instead. And the same relentless drain of war was felt by the tenement people themselves; for all of them were foreigners, and from their relatives abroad, in those wide zones of Europe already blackened and laid waste, in endless torrents through the mails came wild appeals for money.