His weekly dollars kept the whole poor family in food.

But John Sargent was a bachelor, and earning remarkably good wages, and Joseph Atkins's ailing wife, whom illness and privation had made unnaturally grasping and ungrateful, told her cronies that it wasn't as if he couldn't afford it.
Up-stairs little Ellen lay in her bed, her doll in her arms, listening to the low rumble of masculine voices in the room below.
Her mother had gone out, and there were only the men there.

They were smoking, and the odor of their pipes floated up into Ellen's chamber through the door-cracks.

She thought how her grandmother Brewster would sniff when she came in next day.

She could hear her saying, "Well, for my part, if those men couldn't smoke their old pipes somewhere else besides in my sittin'-room, I wouldn't have 'em in the house." But that reflection did not trouble Ellen very long, and she had never been disturbed herself by the odor of the pipes.
She thought of them insensibly as the usual atmosphere when men were gathered together in any place except the church.