The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story Of Julia Page, by Kathleen Norris

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: The Story Of Julia Page
       Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V.

Author: Kathleen Norris

Release Date: December 22, 2004 [EBook #4787]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF JULIA PAGE ***




Produced by Charles Franks, David Garcia and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team







[Illustration: "It has never occurred to one of you to ask _why_ I am
different from other women--to ask just what made me so!"]






THE STORY OF JULIA PAGE

BY KATHLEEN NORRIS

_Frontispiece by C. Allan Gilbert_

1915



CHAPTER I

To Emeline, wife of George Page, there came slowly, in her thirtieth
year, a sullen conviction that life was monstrously unfair. From a
resentful realization that she was not happy in her marriage, Emeline's
mind went back to the days of her pert, precocious childhood and her
restless and discontented girlhood, and she felt, with a sort of
smouldering fury, that she had never been happy, had never had a fair
chance, at all!

It took Mrs. Page some years to come to this conclusion, for, if she was
shrewd and sharp among the women she knew, she was, in essential things,
an unintelligent woman, and mental effort of any sort was strange to
her. Throughout her entire life, her mind had never been truly awakened.
She had scrambled through Grammar School, and had followed it with five
years as saleswoman in a millinery store, in that district of San
Francisco known as the Mission, marrying George Page at twenty-three,
and up to that time well enough pleased with herself and her life.

But that was eight years ago. Now Emeline could see that she had
reached--more, she had passed--her prime. She began to see that the
moods of those early years, however violent and changing, had been fed
upon secret springs of hope, hope vague and baseless enough, but strong
to colour a girl's life with all the brightness of a thousand dawns.
There had been rare potentialities in those days, anything might happen,
something _would_ happen. The little Emeline Cox, moving between the
dreary discomfort of home and the hated routine of school, might
surprise all these dull seniors and school-mates some day! She might
become an actress, she might become a great singer, she might make a
brilliant marriage.

As she grew older and grew prettier, these vague, bright dreams
strengthened. Emeline's mother was an overworked and shrill-voiced
woman, whose personality drove from the Shotwell Street house whatever
small comfort poverty and overcrowding and dirt left in it. She had no
personal message for Emeline. The older woman had never learned the care
of herself, her children, her husband, or her house. She had naturally
nothing to teach her daughter. Emeline's father occasionally thundered a
furious warning to his daughters as to certain primitive moral laws. He
did not tell Emeline and her sisters why they might some day consent to
abandon the path of virtue, nor when, nor how. He never dreamed of
winning their affection and confidence, or of selecting their friends,
and making home a place to which these friends might occasionally come.
But he was fond of shouting, when Emeline, May, or Stella pinned on
their flimsy little hats for an evening walk, that if ever a girl of his
made a fool of herself and got into trouble, she need never come near
his door again! Perhaps Emeline and May and Stella felt that the
virtuous course, as exemplified by their parents, was not all of roses,
either, but they never said so, and always shuddered dutifully at the
paternal warning.

School also failed with the education of the inner Emeline, although she
moved successfully from a process known as "diagramming" sentences to a
serious literary analysis of "Snow-Bound" and "Evangeline," and passed
terrifying examinations in ancient history, geography, and advanced
problems in arithmetic. By the time she left school she was a tall,
giggling, black-eyed creature, to be found walking up and down Mission
Street, and gossiping and chewing gum on almost any sunny afternoon.
Between her mother's whining and her father's bullying, home life was
not very pleasant, but at least there was nothing unusual in the
situation; among all the girls that Emeline knew there was not one who
could go back to a clean room, a hospitable dining-room, a well-cooked
and nourishing meal. All her friends did as she did: wheedled money for
new veils and new shoes from their fathers, helped their mothers
reluctantly and scornfully when they must, slipped away to the street as
often as possible, and when they were at home, added their complaints
and protests to the general unpleasantness.

Had there been anything different before her eyes, who knows what plans
for domestic reform might have taken shape in the girl's plastic brain?
Emeline had never seen one example of real affection and cooperation
between mother and daughters, of work quickly and skilfully done and
forgotten, of a clean bright house and a blossoming garden; she had
never heard a theory otherwise than that she was poor, her friends were
poor, her parents were poor, and that born under the wheels of a
monstrous social injustice, she might just as well be dirty and
discouraged and discontented at once and have done with it, for in the
end she must be so. Why should she question the abiding belief? Emeline
knew that, with her father's good pay and the excellent salaries earned
by her hard-handed, patient-eyed, stupid young brothers, the family
income ran well up toward three hundred dollars a month: her father
worked steadily at five dollars a day, George was a roofer's assistant
and earned eighty dollars a month, and Chester worked in a plumber's
shop, and at eighteen was paid sixty-five dollars. Emeline could only
conclude that three hundred dollars a month was insufficient to prevent
dirt, crowding, scolding, miserable meals, and an incessant atmosphere
of warm soapsuds.

Presently she outraged her father by going into "Delphine's" millinery
store. Delphine was really a stout, bleached woman named Lizzie Clarke,
whose reputation was not quite good, although nobody knew anything
definite against her. She had a double store on Market Street near
Eleventh, a dreary place, with dusty models in the windows, torn
Nottingham curtains draped behind them, and "Delphine" scrawled in gold
across the dusty windows in front. Emeline used to wonder, in the days
when she and her giggling associates passed "Delphine's" window, who
ever bought the dreadful hats in the left-hand window, although they
admitted a certain attraction on the right. Here would be a sign: "Any
Hat in this Window, Two Dollars," surrounded by cheap, dust-grained
felts, gaudily trimmed, or coarse straws wreathed with cotton flowers.
Once or twice Emeline and her friends went in, and one day when a card
in the window informed the passers-by that an experienced saleslady was
wanted, the girl, sick of the situation at home and longing for novelty,
boldly applied for the position. Miss Clarke engaged her at once.

Emeline met, as she had expected, a storm at home, but she weathered it,
and kept her position. It was hard work, and poorly paid, but the girl's
dreams gilded everything, and she loved the excitement of making sales,
came eagerly to the gossip and joking of her fellow-workers every
morning, and really felt herself to be in the current of life at last.

Miss Clarke was no better than her reputation, and would have willingly
helped her young saleswoman into a different sort of life. But Emeline's
little streak of shrewd selfishness saved her. Emeline indulged in a
hundred little coarsenesses and indiscretions, but take the final step
toward ruin she would not. Nobody was going to get the better of her,
she boasted. She used rouge and lip red. She "met fellers" under flaming
gas jets, and went to dance halls with them, and to the Sunday picnics
that were her father's especial abomination; she shyly told vile stories
and timidly used strong words, but there it ended. Perhaps some tattered
remnant of the golden dream still hung before her eyes; perhaps she
still clung to the hope of a dim, wonderful time to come.

More than that, the boys she knew were not a vicious lot; the Jimmies
and Johnnies, the Dans and Eds, were for the most part neighbours, no
more anxious to antagonize Emeline's father than she was. They might
kiss her good-night at her door, they might deliberately try to get the
girls to miss the last train home from the picnic, but their spirit was
of idle mischief rather than malice, and a stinging slap from Emeline's
hand afforded them, as it did her, a certain shamed satisfaction.

George Page came into "Delphine's" on a windy summer afternoon when
Emeline had been there for nearly five years. He was a salesman for some
lines of tailored hats, a San Franciscan, but employed by a New York
wholesale house. Emeline chanced to be alone in the place, for Miss
Clarke was sick in bed, and the other saleswoman away on her vacation.
The trimmers, glancing out through a plush curtain at the rear, saw Miss
Cox and the "drummer" absorbed in a three hours' conversation. From two
to five o'clock they talked; the drummer watching her in obvious
admiration when an occasional customer interrupted, and when Miss Cox
went home the drummer escorted her. Emeline had left the parental roof
some two years before; she was rooming, now, with a mild and virtuous
girl named Regina Lynch, in Howard Street. Regina was the sort of girl
frequently selected by a girl of Emeline's type for confidante and
companion: timid, conventional, always ready to laugh and admire. Regina
consented to go to dinner with Emeline and Mr. Page, and as she later
refused to go to the theatre, Emeline would not go either; they all
walked out Market Street from the restaurant, and reached the Howard
Street house at about nine o'clock. Regina went straight upstairs, but
Emeline and George Page sat on the steps an hour longer, under the
bright summer moon, and when Emeline went upstairs she woke her roommate
up, and announced her engagement.

George came into the store at nine o'clock the next morning, to
radiantly confirm all that they had said the night before, and with
great simplicity the two began to plan for their future; from that time
they had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together every day; they were both
utterly satisfied; they never questioned their fate. In October George
had to go to San Diego, and a dozen little cities en route, for the
firm, and Emeline went, too. They were married in the little church of
Saint Charles in Eighteenth Street, only an hour or two before they
started for San Jose, the first stop in George's itinerary. Emeline's
mother and sisters came to her wedding, but the men of the family were
working on this week-day afternoon. The bride looked excited and happy,
colour burned scarlet in her cheeks, under her outrageous hat; she wore
a brown travelling gown, and the lemon-coloured gloves that were popular
in that day. Emeline felt that she was leaving everything unpleasant in
life behind her. George was the husband of her dreams--or perhaps her
dreams had temporarily adapted themselves to George.

But, indeed, he was an exceptionally good fellow. He was handsome, big,
dashingly dressed. He was steady and successful in his work, domestic in
his tastes, and tenderly--and perhaps to-day a little pityingly--devoted
to this pretty, clever girl who loved him so, and had such faith in him.
His life had kept him a good deal among men, and rather coarse men; he
had had to do more drinking than he cared to do, to play a good deal of
poker, to listen to a good deal of loose talk. Now, George felt a great
relief that this was over; he wanted a home, a wife, children.

The bride and groom had a cloudless three weeks of honeymoon among a
score of little Southern towns--and were scarcely less happy during the
first months of settling down. Emeline was entirely ignorant of what was
suitable or desirable in a home, and George had only the crude ideals of
a travelling man to guide him. They enthusiastically selected a flat of
four handsome, large, dark rooms, over a corner saloon, on O'Farrell
Street. The building was new, the neighbourhood well built, and filled
with stirring, interesting life. George said it was conveniently near
the restaurant and theatre district, and to Emeline, after Mission
Street, it seemed the very hub of the world. The suite consisted of a
large front drawing-room, connected by enormous folding doors with a
rear drawing-room, which the Pages would use as a bedroom, a large
dining-room, and a dark kitchen, equipped with range and "water back."
There were several enormous closets, and the stairs and hall, used by
the several tenants of the house, were carpeted richly. The Pages also
carpeted their own rooms, hung the stiff folds of Nottingham lace
curtains at the high narrow windows, and selected a set of the heavily
upholstered furniture of the period for their drawing-room. When
Emeline's mother and sisters came to call, Emeline showed them her
gold-framed pictures, her curly-maple bed and bureau, her glass closet
in the dining-room, with its curved glass front and sides and its
shining contents--berry saucers and almond dishes in pressed glass, and
other luxuries to which the late Miss Cox had been entirely a stranger.
Emeline was intoxicated with the freedom and the pleasures of her new
life; George was out of town two or three nights a week, but when he was
at home the two slept late of mornings, and loitered over their
breakfast, Emeline in a loose wrapper, filling and refilling her coffee
cup, while George rattled the paper and filled the room with the odour
of cigarettes.

Then Emeline was left to put her house in order, and dress herself for
the day--her corsets laced tight at the waist, her black hair crimped
elaborately above her bang, her pleated skirts draped fashionably over
her bustle. George would come back at one o'clock to take her to lunch,
and after lunch they wandered up and down Kearney and Market streets,
laughing and chatting, glad just to be alive and together. Sometimes
they dined downtown, too, and afterward went to the "Tivoli" or
"Morosco's," or even the Baldwin Theatre, and sometimes bought and
carried home the materials for a dinner, and invited a few of George's
men friends to enjoy it with them. These were happy times; Emeline,
flushed and pretty in her improvised apron, queened it over the three or
four adoring males, and wondered why other women fussed so long over
cooking, when men so obviously enjoyed a steak, baked potatoes, canned
vegetables, and a pie from Swain's. After dinner the men always played
poker, a mild little game at first, with Emeline eagerly guarding a
little pile of chips, and gasping over every hand like a happy child;
but later more seriously, when Emeline, contrary to poker superstition,
sat on the arm of her husband's chair, to bring him luck.

Luck she certainly seemed to bring him; the Pages would go yawning to
bed, after one of these evenings, chuckling over the various hands.

"I couldn't see what you drew, George," Emeline would say, "but I could
see that Mack had aces on the roof, and it made me crazy to have you go
on raising that way! And then your three fish hooks!"

George would shout with pride at her use of poker terms--would laugh all
the harder if she used them incorrectly. And sometimes, sinking
luxuriously into the depths of the curly-maple bed, Emeline would think
herself the luckiest woman in the world. No hurry about getting up in
the morning; no one to please but herself; pretty gowns and an adoring
husband and a home beyond her maddest hopes--the girl's dreams no longer
followed her, happy reality had blotted out the dream.

She felt a little injured, a little frightened, when the day came on
which she must tell George of some pretty well-founded suspicions of her
own condition. George might be "mad," or he might laugh.

But George was wonderfully soothing and reassuring; more, was
pathetically glad and proud. He petted Emeline into a sort of reluctant
joy, and the attitude of her mother and sisters and the few women she
knew was likewise flattering. Important, self-absorbed, she waited her
appointed days, and in the early winter a wizened, mottled little
daughter was born. Julia was the name Emeline had chosen for a girl, and
Julia was the name duly given her by the radiant and ecstatic George in
the very first hour of her life. Emeline had lost interest in the
name--indeed, in the child and her father as well--just then; racked,
bewildered, wholly spent, she lay back in the curly-maple bed, the first
little seed of that general resentment against life that was eventually
to envelop her, forming in her mind.

They had told her that because of this or that she would not have a
"hard time," and she had had a very hard time. They had told her that
she would forget the cruel pain the instant it was over, and she knew
she never would forget it. It made her shudder weakly to think of all
the babies in the world--of the schools packed with children--at what a
cost!

Emeline recovered quickly, and shut her resentment into her own breast.
Julie, as she was always called, was a cross baby, and nowadays the two
front rooms were usually draped with her damp undergarments, and odorous
of sour bottles and drying clothes. For the few months that Emeline
nursed the child she wandered about until late in the day in a loose
wrapper, a margin of draggled nightgown showing under it, her hair in a
tumbled knot at the back of her head. If she had to run out for a loaf
of bread or a pound of coffee, she slipped on a street skirt, and
buttoned her long coat about her; her lean young throat would show, bare
above the lapels of the coat, but even this costume was not conspicuous
in that particular neighbourhood.

By the time Julia was weaned, Emeline had formed the wrapper habit; she
had also slipped back to the old viewpoint: they were poor people, and
the poor couldn't afford to do things decently, to live comfortably.
Emeline scolded and snapped at George, shook and scolded the crying
baby, and loitered in the hall for long, complaining gossips with the
other women of the house.

Time extricated the young Pages from these troubled days. Julia grew
into a handsome, precocious little girl of whom both parents could be
proud. Emeline never quite recovered her girlish good looks, her face
was thin now, with prominent cheek bones; there was a little frowning
line drawn between her eyes, and her expression was sharp and anxious,
but she became more fond of dress than ever.

George's absences were a little longer in these days; he had been given
a larger territory to cover--and Emeline naturally turned for society
toward her women neighbours. There were one or two very congenial
married women of her own type in the same house, pleasure-loving,
excitable young women; one, a Mrs. Carter, with two children in school,
the other, Mrs. Palmer, triumphantly childless. These introduced her to
others; sometimes half a dozen of them would go to a matinee together, a
noisy, chattering group. During the matinee Julia would sit on her
mother's lap, a small awed figure in a brief red silk dress and deep
lace collar. Julia always had several chocolates from the boxes that
circulated among her elders, and usually went to sleep during the last
act, and was dragged home, blinking and whining and wretched, by one
aching little arm.

George was passionately devoted to his little girl, and no toy was too
expensive for Julia to demand. Emeline loved the baby, too, although she
accepted as a martyrdom the responsibility of supplying Julia's needs.
But the Pages themselves rather drifted apart with the years. Both were
selfish, and each accused the other of selfishness, although, as Emeline
said stormily, no one had ever called her that before she was married,
and, as George sullenly claimed, he himself had always been popularity's
self among the "fellows."

In all her life Emeline had never felt anything but a resentful
impatience for whatever curtailed her liberty or disturbed her comfort
in the slightest degree. She had never settled down to do cheerfully
anything that she did not want to do. She had shaken off the claims of
her own home as lightly as she had stepped from "Delphine's" to the more
tempting position of George's wife. Now she could not believe that she
was destined to live on with a man who was becoming a confirmed
dyspeptic, who thought she was a poor housekeeper, an extravagant
shopper, a wretched cook, and worse than all, a sloven about her
personal appearance. Emeline really was all these things at times, and
suspected it, but she had never been shown how to do anything else, and
she denied all charges noisily.

One night when Julia was about four George stamped out of the house,
after a tirade against the prevailing disorder and some insulting
remarks about "delicatessen food." Emeline sent a few furious remarks
after him, and then wept over the sliced ham, the potato salad, and the
Saratoga chips, all of which she had brought home from a nearby delicacy
shop in oily paper bags only an hour ago. She wandered disconsolately
through the four rooms that had been her home for nearly six years. The
dust lay thick on the polished wood and glass of the sideboard and glass
closet in the dining-room; ashes and the ends of cigarettes filled half
a dozen little receptacles here and there; a welter of newspapers had
formed a great drift in a corner of the room, and the thick velour day
cover of the table had been pushed back to make way for a doubled and
spotted tablecloth and the despised meal. The kitchen was hideous with a
confusion of souring bottles of milk, dirty dishes, hardened ends of
loaves, and a sticky jam jar or two; Emeline's range was spotted and
rusty, she never fired it now; a three-burner gas plate sufficed for the
family's needs. In the bedroom a dozen garments were flung over the foot
of the unmade bed, Julia's toys and clothing littered this and the
sitting-room, the silk woof had been worn away on the heavily
upholstered furniture, and the strands of the cotton warp separated to
show the white lining beneath. On the mantel was a litter of medicine
bottles and theatre programs, powder boxes, gloves and slippers,
packages of gum and of cigarettes, and packs of cards, as well as more
ornamental matters: china statuettes and glass cologne bottles, a
palm-leaf fan with roses painted on it, a pincushion of redwood bark,
and a plush rolling-pin with brass screws in it, hung by satin ribbons.
Over all lay a thick coat of dust.

Emeline took Julia in her lap, and sat down in one of the patent
rockers. She remained for a long time staring out of the front window.
George's words burned angrily in her memory--she felt sick of life.

A spring twilight was closing down upon O'Farrell Street. In the row of
houses opposite Emeline could see slits of gaslight behind lowered
shades, and could look straight into the second floor of the
establishment that flourished behind a large sign bearing the words,
"O'Connor, Modes." This row of bay-windowed houses had been occupied as
homes by very good families when the Pages first came to O'Farrell
Street, but six years had seen great changes in the block. A grocery and
bar now occupied the corner, facing the saloon above which the Pages
lived, and the respectable middle-class families had moved away, one by
one, giving place to all sorts of business enterprises. Milliners and
dressmakers took the first floors, and rented the upper rooms; one
window said "Mme. Claire, Palmist," and another "Violin Lessons"; one
basement was occupied by a dealer in plaster statuary, and another by a
little restaurant. Most interesting of all to the stageloving Emeline
was the second floor, obliquely opposite her own, which bore an immense
sign, "Gottoli, Wigs and Theatrical Supplies. Costumes of all sorts
Designed and on Hand." Between Gottoli's windows were two painted panels
representing respectively a very angular, moustached young man in a
dress suit, and a girl in a Spanish dancer's costume, with a tambourine.
Gottoli did not do a very flourishing business, but Emeline watched his
doorway by the hour, and if ever her dreams came back now, it was at
these times.

To-night Julia went to sleep in her arms; she was an unexacting little
girl, accustomed to being ignored much of the time, and humoured,
over-indulged, and laughed at at long intervals. Emeline sat on and on,
crying now and then, and gradually reducing herself to a more softened
mood, when she longed to be dear to George again, to please and content
him. She had just made up her mind that this was no neighbourhood for
ideal home life, when George, smelling strongly of whiskey, but
affectionate and repentant, came in.

"What doing?" asked George, stumbling in the dark room.

"Just watching the cable cars go up and down," Emeline said, rousing.
She set the dazed Julia on her feet, and groped for matches on the
mantel. A second later the stifling odour of block matches drifted
through the room, and Emeline lighted a gas jet.

"Had your supper?" said she, as George sat down and took the child into
his arms.

"Nope," he answered, grinning ashamedly. "Thought maybe you and I'd go
to dinner somewheres, Em."

Emeline was instantly her better self. While she flew into her best
clothes she told George that she knew she was a rotten manager, but she
was so darn sick of this darn flat--She had just been sitting there
wondering if they hadn't better move into the country, say into Oakland.
Her sister May lived there, they might get a house near May, with a
garden for Julia, and a spare room where George could put up a friend.

George was clumsily enthusiastic. Gosh, if she would do that--if she
could stand its being a little quiet--

"I'd get to know the neighbours, and we'd have real good times," said
Emeline optimistically, "and it would be grand for Julie!"

Julia had by this time gone off to sleep in the centre of the large bed.
Her mother removed the child's shoes and some of her clothing, without
rousing her, loosened her garters, and unbuttoned whatever buttons she
could reach.

"She'll be all right," she said confidently. "She never wakes."

George lowered the gas, and they tiptoed out. But Julie did waken half
an hour later, as it happened, and screamed for company for ten hideous
minutes. Then Miss Flossie Miniver, a young woman who had recently
rented the top floor, and of whom Emeline and the other ladies of the
house disapproved, came downstairs and softly entered the Page flat, and
gathered the sobbing little girl to her warm, soft breast. Miss Miniver
soothed her with a new stick of gum and a pincushion that looked like a
fat little pink satin leg, with a smart boot at one end and a ruffle of
lace at the other, and left Julia peacefully settled down to sleep. But
Julia did not remember anything of this in the morning, and the
pincushion had rolled under the bed, so Emeline never knew of it. She
and George had a good dinner, and later went to the Orpheum, and were
happier than they had been for a long time.

The next Sunday they went to Oakland to see Emeline's sister, and
possibly to begin househunting. It was a cold, dark day, with a raw wind
blowing. Gulls dipped and screamed over the wake of the ferryboat that
carried the Pages to Oakland, and after the warm cabin and the heated
train, they all shivered miserably as they got out at the appointed
corner. Oakland looked bleak and dreary, the wind was blowing chaff and
papers against fences and steps.

Emeline had rather lost sight of her sister for a year or two, and had
last seen her in another and better house than the one which they
presently identified by street and number. The sisters had married at
about the same time, but Ed Torney was a shiftless and unfortunate man,
never steadily at work, and always mildly surprised at the discomfort of
life. May had four children, and was expecting a fifth. Two of the older
children, stupid-looking little blondes, with colds in their noses, and
dirt showing under the fair hair, were playing in the dooryard of the
shabby cottage now. The gate hung loose, the ground was worn bare by
children's feet and dug into holes where children had burrowed, and
littered with cans and ropes and boxes.

Emeline was genuinely shocked by the evidences of actual want inside.
May was a thin, bent, sickly looking woman now, her graying hair hanging
in a loose coil over her cotton wrapper. Floors everywhere were bare, a
few chairs were here and there, a few beds running over with thin
bedding, a table in the kitchen was covered with scattered dishes, some
dirty and some clean. Ashes drifted out of the kitchen stove, and in the
sink was a great tin dish-pan full of cool, greasy water. The oldest
child, a five-year-old girl, had followed these dazzling visitors in,
and now mounted a box and attacked this dish-pan with pathetic energy.
The two younger children sat on the floor, apathetically staring. May
made only a few smiling apologies. They "could see how she was," she
said, limping to a chair into which she dropped with a sigh of relief.
They had had a "fierce" time since Ed--Ed was the husband and
father--had lost his job a year ago. He had not been able to get
anything permanent since. Ed had been there just a minute ago, she
said--and indeed the odour of tobacco was still strong on the close
air--but he had been having a good deal of stomach trouble of late, and
the children made him nervous, and he had gone out for a walk. Poor May,
smiling gallantly over the difficulties of her life, drew her firstborn
to her knees, brushed back the child's silky, pale hair with bony,
trembling fingers, and prophesied that things would be easier when
mamma's girlies got to work: Evelyn was going to be a dressmaker, and
Marguerite an actress.

"She can say a piece out of the Third Reader real cute--the children
next door taught her," said May, but Marguerite would not be exploited;
she dug her blonde head into her mother's shoulder in a panic of
shyness; and shortly afterward the Pages went away. Uncle George gave
each child a dime, Julia kissed her little cousins good-bye, and Emeline
felt a sick spasm of pity and shame as May bade the children thank them,
and thanked them herself. Emeline drew her sister to the door, and
pressed two silver dollars, all she happened to have with her, into her
hand.

"Aw, don't, Em, you oughtn't," May said, ashamed and turning crimson,
but instantly she took the money. "We've had an awful hard time--or I
wouldn't!" said she, tears coming to her eyes.

"Oh, that's all right!" Emeline said uncomfortably, as she ran down the
steps. Her heart burned with sympathy for poor May, who had been so
pretty and so clever! Emeline could not understand the change! May had
graduated from High School with honours; she had held a good position as
a bookkeeper in a grocery before her marriage, but, like Emeline, for
the real business of life she had had no preparation at all. Her own
oldest child could have managed the family finances and catered to
sensitive stomachs with as much system and intelligence as May.

On the boat Emeline spoke of her little money gift to her sister, and
George roused himself from a deep study to approve and to reimburse her.
They did not speak again of moving to the country, and went straight
from the boat to a French table d'hote dinner, where Julia, enchanted at
finding herself warm and near food after the long cold adventures of the
day, stuffed herself on sardines and sour bread, soup and salad, and
shrimps and fried chicken, and drank tumblers of claret and sugar and
ice water.

There were still poker parties occasionally in the Page flat; Emeline
was quite familiar with poker phraseology now, and if George seemed less
pleased than he had been when she rattled away about hands, the men who
came were highly diverted by it. Two or three other wives generally
joined the party now; there would be seven or eight players about the
round table.

They all drank as they played, the room would get very warm, and reek of
tobacco and of whiskey and beer. Sometimes Julia woke up with a
terrified shout, and then, if Emeline were playing, she would get
George, or one of the other men or women, to go in and quiet the little
girl. These games would not break up until two or three o'clock. Emeline
would be playing excitedly, her face flushed, her eyes shining, every
fibre of her being alert, when suddenly the life would seem to fade out
of the whole game. An overwhelming ennui would seize her, a cold,
clear-eyed fatigue--the cards would seem meaningless, a chill would
shake her, a need of yawning. The whole company would be suddenly
likewise affected, the game would break up with a few brief words, and
Emeline, going in with her guests to help them with hats and wraps,
would find herself utterly silent, too cold and weary for even the most
casual civilities. When the others had gone, she and George would turn
the lights out on the wreckage of the dining-room, and stagger silently
to bed.

Fatigue would follow Emeline well into the next day after one of these
card parties. If George was going out of town, she would send Julia off
to play with other children in the house, and lie in bed until noon,
getting up now and then to hold a conversation with some tradesman
through a crack in the door. At one she might sally forth in her
favourite combination of wrapper and coat to buy cream and rolls, and
Julia would be regaled on sausages, hot cakes, bakery cookies, and
coffee, or come in to find no lunch at all, and that her mother had gone
out for the afternoon.

Emeline had grown more and more infatuated with the theatre and all that
pertained to it. She went to matinees twice a week, and she and her
group of intimate friends also "went Dutch" to evening performances
whenever it was possible. Their conversation was spattered with
theatrical terms, and when, as occasionally happened, a real actress or
even a chorus girl from the Tivoli joined their group, Emeline could
hardly contain her eagerness and her admiration. She loved, when rare
chance offered, to go behind the scenes; she frankly envied the
egotistic, ambitious young theatrical beginners, so eager to talk of
themselves and their talents, to discuss every detail from grease paint
to management. To poor hungry Emeline it was like a revelation of
another, brighter world.

She would loiter out from the brief enchantment of "Two True Hearts"
into the foggy dampness of Market Street, at twilight, eagerly grasping
the suggestion of ice-cream sodas, because it meant a few minutes more
with her friends. Perhaps, sipping the frothy confection, Emeline would
see some of the young actresses going by, just from the theatre,
buttoned into long coats, their faces still rosy from cold cream; they
must rush off for a light dinner, and be back at the theatre at seven.
At the sight of them a pang always shot through Emeline, an exquisite
agony of jealousy seized her. Oh, to be so busy, so full of affairs, to
move constantly from one place to another--now dragging a spangled gown,
now gay as a peasant, now gaudily dressed as a page!

Emeline would finish her soda in silence, lift the over-dressed Julia
from her chair, and start soberly for home. Julia's short little legs
ached from the quick walk, yet she hated as much as her mother the
plunge from brightly lighted O'Farrell Street into their own hall, so
large and damp and dark, so odorous of stale beer and rubber floor
covering. A dim point of gas in a red shade covered with symmetrical
glass blisters usually burned over the stairway, but the Pages'
apartment was dark, except for a dull reflected light from the street.
Perhaps Julia and her mother would find George there, with his coat and
shoes off, and his big body flung down across the bed, asleep. George
would wake up slowly, with much yawning and grumbling, Emeline would add
her gloves and belt to the unspeakable confusion of the bureau, and
Julia would flatten her tired little back against the curve of an
armchair and follow with heavy, brilliant eyes the argument that always
followed.

"Well, we could get some chops--chops and potatoes--and a can of corn,"
Emeline would grudgingly admit, as she tore off her tight corsets with a
great gasp of relief, and slipped into her kimono, "or you could get
some spaghetti and some mangoes at the delicatessen--"

"Oh, God, cut out the delicatessen stuff!" George invariably said; "me
for the chops, huh, Julie?"

"Or--we could all go somewhere," Emeline might submit tentatively.

"_Nit_," George would answer. "Come on, Ju, we'll go buy a steak!"

But he was not very well pleased with his dinner, even when he had his
own way. When he and Julia returned with their purchases Emeline
invariably met them at the top of the stairs.

"We need butter, George, I forgot to tell you--you'll have to go back!"
she would say. Julia, tired almost beyond endurance, still preferred to
go with her father.

There was not enough gas heat under Emeline's frying pan to cook a steak
well; George growled as he cut it. Emeline jumped up for forgotten table
furnishings; grease splashed on the rumpled cloth. After the one course
the head of the house would look about hungrily.

"No cheese in the house, I suppose?"

"No--I don't believe there is."

"What's the chances on a salad?"

"Oh, no, George--that takes lettuce, you know. My goodness!" And Emeline
would put her elbows on the table and yawn, the rouge showing on her
high cheek bones, her eyes glittering, her dark hair still pressed down
where her hat had lain. "My goodness!" she would exclaim impatiently,
"haven't you had enough, George? You had steak, and potatoes, and
corn--why don't you eat your corn?"

"What's the chances on a cup of tea?" George might ask, seizing a half
slice of bread, and doubling an ounce of butter into it, with his great
thumb on the blade of his knife.

"You can have all the tea you want, but you'll have to use condensed
milk!"

At this George would say "Damn!" and take himself and his evening paper
to the armchair in the front window. When Emeline would go in, after a
cursory disposition of the dishes, she would find Julia curled in his
arms, and George sourly staring over the little silky head.

"It's up to you, and it's your job, and it makes me damn sick to come
home to such a dirty pen as this!" George sometimes burst out. "Look at
that--and look at that--look at that mantel!"

"Well--well--well!" Emeline would answer sharply, putting the mantel
straight, or commencing to do so with a sort of lazy scorn. "I can't do
everything!"

"Other men go home to decent dinners," George would pursue sullenly;
"their wives aren't so darn lazy and selfish--"

Such a start as this always led to a bitter quarrel, after which
Emeline, trembling with anger, would clear a corner of the cluttered
drawing-room table and take out a shabby pack of cards for solitaire,
and George would put Julia to bed. All her life Julia Page remembered
these scenes and these bedtimes.

Her father sometimes tore the tumbled bed apart, and made it up again,
smoothing the limp sheets with clumsy fingers, and talking to Julia,
while he worked, of little girls who had brothers and sisters, and who
lived in the country, and hung their stockings up on Christmas Eve.
Emeline pretended not to notice either father or daughter at these
times, although she could have whisked Julia into bed in half the time
it took George to do it, and was really very kind to the child when
George was not there.

When George asked the little girl to find her hairbrush, and blundered
over the buttons of her nightgown, Emeline hummed a sprightly air. She
never bore resentment long.

"What say we go out later and get something to eat, George?" she would
ask, when George tiptoed out of the bedroom and shut the folding door
behind him. But several hours of discomfort were not to be so lightly
dismissed by George.

"Maybe," he would briefly answer. And invariably he presently muttered
something about asking "Cass" for the time, and so went down to the
saloon of "J. Cassidy," just underneath his own residence.

Emeline, alone, would brood resentfully over her cards. That was the way
of it: men could run off to saloons, while she, pretty and young, and
with the love of life still strong in her veins, might as well be dead
and buried! Bored and lonely, she would creep into bed beside Julia,
after turning the front-room light down to a bead, and flinging over the
"bed lounge," upon which George spent the night, the musty sheets and
blankets and the big soggy pillows.

But George, meanwhile, would have found warmth, brightness,
companionship, and good food. The drink that was his passport to all
these good things was the least of them in his eyes. George did not care
particularly for drink, but he usually came home the worse for it on
these occasions, and Emeline had a real foundation for her furious
harangues in the morning. She would scold while she carried him in hot
coffee or chopped ice, scold while she crimped her hair and covered her
face with a liquid bleach, scold as she jerked Julia's little bonnet on
the child's lovely mane, and depart, with a final burst of scolding and
a bang of the door.

One day Emeline came in to find George at home, ill. She had said
good-bye to him only the day before, for what was supposedly a week, and
was really concerned to find him back so soon, shivering and mumbling,
and apparently unable to get into bed. Emeline sent Julia flying to a
neighbour, made George as comfortable as she could in the big bed, and
listened, with a conviction as firm as his own, to what he believed to
be parting instructions and messages.

"I'm going, Em," said George heavily. "I'm worse now than I was when I
started for home. I wanted to see you again, baby girl, and Julia, too.
I--I can't breathe----"

Julia presently came flying in with a doctor and with a neighbour, Mrs.
Cotter, who had telephoned to him. The doctor said that George had a
sharp touch of influenza, and Emeline settled down to nurse him.

George was a bad patient. He had a great many needs, and he mentioned
one after another in the weighty, serious tone of a person imparting
valuable information.

"Ice--ice," said George, moving hot eyes to meet his wife's glance as
she came in. "And take that extra blanket off, Emeline, and--no hurry,
but I'll try the soup again whenever you say--I seem to feel weak. I
must have more air, dear. Help me sit up, Em, and you can shake these
pillows up again. I think I'm a good deal sicker man than Allan has any
idea----"

Emeline got very tired of it, especially as George was much better on
the third day, and could sit up. He developed a stiff neck, which made
him very irritable, and even Julia "got on his nerves" and was banished
for the day to the company of the cheerful Jewish family who lived on an
upper floor. He sat in an armchair, wrapped in blankets, his rigid gaze
roving a pitifully restricted perspective of street outside the window,
an elaborate cough occasionally racking him.

Emeline had gotten a fairly tempting dinner under way. She could cook
some things well, and at five o'clock she came in from the kitchen with
an appetizing tray.

"Gosh, is it dinner time?" asked George.

"After five," Emeline said, flitting about the bed-room. Julia had come
home now, sweet and tired, and was silently eating slice after slice of
bread and jelly. Emeline opened out the bed lounge, spread sheets and
blankets smoothly, and flung a clean little nightgown for Julia across
the foot. Darkness had fallen outside; she lighted the gas and drew the
shades.

"This is comfortable!" said George. "I wouldn't mind being sick now and
then at this rate! Come over here and undress near Pop, Julie. I'll tell
you what, Em--you call down the air shaft to Cass, and tell him to send
Henny up to make us a nice little coal fire here. I'll give Henny a
quarter."

"She's gone into the bathroom to fix her hair and wash her face," Julia
observed, as Emeline did not answer. A second later the child jumped up
to answer a sharp knock on the door.

To George's disgust it was Emeline's friend, Mrs. Marvin Povey, who came
in. Mrs. Povey was a tightly corseted, coarse-voiced, highly coloured
little blonde, breathless now from running upstairs. Her sister, Myrtle
Montague, was an ingenue in the little stock company at the Central
Theatre, and Mrs. Povey kept house for her and Mr. Povey, who spent all
his waking hours at the racetrack. The Poveys' flat was only a block
away from the Pages'.

George was furious to have this woman, whom he particularly detested,
come in upon him thus informally, and find him at so great a
disadvantage. His neck was better, but he could not move it very easily
still; he was trapped here in blankets like a baby; he was acutely
conscious of his three days' beard, of Julia's bed made up in the middle
of the drawing-room, and of Julia's self, partly disrobed, and running
about in the general disorder.

"Well, how does the other feller look?" said Mrs. Povey, laughing
good-naturedly. "You look like you'd broke out of San Quentin, George,
with that face! Hello, darlin'," she added, waylaying Julia. "When are
you going to come and be Aunt Mame's girl, huh? Going to come home with
me to-night?"

"Em!" bellowed George, with only a sickly smile for the guest. "_Em_!"

"My God, what is it now?" said Emeline sweetly, popping in her head.
"Oh, hello, Mame!" she added, coming in. "Where's the rest of the
girls?"

"They've all blew up to the house with Myrt," said Mrs. Povey, staring
blankly at Emeline. "But say, ain't you going, dear?"

"Wait till I get my dress on, and we'll talk it over while I hook up,"
Emeline said, disappearing again. She did not glance at George.

"Myrt's in a new show, and a few of us girls are going to see that she
gets a hand," Mrs. Povey said. "We're going to have supper at my house.
Mary will have some of the boys there."

"I guess Emeline will have to wait till the next time," George said
coldly. "She wouldn't get much pleasure out of it, leaving me here as
sick as I am!"

"Oh, I don't know!" Mrs. Povey half sang, half laughed. "Emeline likes a
good time, like all the rest of us, George, and it don't do to keep a
pretty girl shut up all the time!"

"Shut up? She's never here," George growled.

"Well, we'll see!" Mrs. Povey hummed contentedly. A moment later Emeline
came in, wrenching the hooks of her best gown together. She had her hat
on, and looked excited and resolute.

"I forgot I'd promised to go out with the girls, George," she began.
"You don't care, do you? You've had your supper, and all Julia's got to
do is get into bed."

George looked balefully from one to the other. Mrs. Povey chanced a
quick little wink of approval and encouragement at Emeline, and he saw
it.

"A lot you forgot!" he said harshly to his wife. "You've been getting
ready for the last hour. Don't either of you think that you're fooling
me--I see through it! I could lay here and die, and a lot you'd care!
You forgot--ha!"

The blood rushed instantly to Emeline's face, she turned upon him her
ugliest look, and the hand with which she was buttoning her glove
trembled.

"Now, I'll tell you something, Mr. George Page!" said she, in an intense
and passionate tone, "there _are_ things I'd rather do than set around
this house and hear you tell how sick you are! You think I'm a white
chip in this family, but let me tell you something--there's plenty of
lovely friends I got who think I'm a fool to keep it up! I had an offer
to go on the stage, not a month ago, from a manager who didn't even know
I was married; didn't I, Mame? And if it wasn't for Julie there----"

"You've not got anything on me, Em," George said, breathing hard, his
face blood red with anger. "Do you think that if it wasn't for this kid,
I'd----"

"Oh, folks--folks!" Mrs. Povey said, really concerned.

"Well, I don't care!" Emeline said, panting. She crossed the floor,
still panting, kissed Julia, and swept from the room. Mrs. Povey,
murmuring some confused farewell, followed her.

Julia climbed out of her big chair. Like all children, she was
frightened by loud voices and domestic scenes; she was glad now that the
quarrel was over, and anxious, in a small girl's fashion, to blot the
recent unpleasantness from her father's mind.

She sat on his knee and talked to him, she sang, she patted his sore
neck with sleek, dirty little fingers. And finally she won him. George
laughed, and entered into her mood. He thought her a very smart little
girl, as indeed she was. She had a precocious knowledge of the affairs
of her mother's friends, sordid affairs enough, and more sordid than
ever when retailed by a child's fresh mouth. Julia talked of money
trouble, of divorce, of dressmaker's bills, of diseases; she repeated
insolent things that had been said to her in the street, and her
insolent replies; her rich, delicious laugh broke out over the memory of
the "drunk" that had been thrown out of Cassidy's.

George laughed at it all; it sounded very funny to him, coming from this
very small person, with her round, serious eyes, and her mop of gold. He
asked her what she wanted him to bring her next time he came home, and
Julia said black boots with white tops and tassels, and made him laugh
again.

Thus early did Julia act as a mediator between her parents, but of this
particular occasion she had no recollection, nor of much that followed
it. Had she been a few years older she might really have affected a
lasting reconciliation between them, for all that was best in George
made him love his daughter, and Emeline was intensely proud of the
child. As it was, Julia was too young. She might unconsciously be the
means of reuniting them now and then, but she could not at all grasp the
situation, and when she was not quite seven a decree of divorce, on the
ground of desertion, set both Emeline and George free, after eight years
of married life.

Emeline was too frightened at the enormity of the thing to be either
glad or sorry. She had never meant to go so far. She had threatened
George with divorce just as George had threatened her, in the heat of
anger, practically since her wedding day. But the emotion that finally
drove Emeline to a lawyer was not anger, it was just dull rebellion
against the gray, monotonous level of her days. She was alone when
George was away on trips; she was not less alone when he was in town. He
had formed the habit of joining "the boys" in the evening; he was surly
and noncommittal with his wife, but Julia, hanging about the lower hall
door or playing with children in the street, always heard a burst of
laughter as he joined his friends; everybody in the world--except
Emeline--liked George!

Poor Emeline--she could easily have held him! A little tenderness toward
him, a little interest in her home and her child, and George would have
been won again. Had he but once come home to a contented wife and a
clean house, George's wavering affection would have been regained. But
Emeline was a loud-mouthed, assertive woman now, noisily set upon her
own way, and filled with a sense of her own wrongs. She had discussed
George too often with her friends to feel any possible interest in him
except as a means of procuring sympathy. George bored her now; as a
matter of fact, Emeline had almost decided that she would prefer alimony
to George.

Goaded on by Mrs. Povey, and a young Mrs. Sunius, affectionately known
as Maybelle, Emeline went to see a lawyer. The lawyer surprised her by
his considerate brevity. Getting a divorce was a very simple affair,
much better done than not. There were ways to make a man pay his alimony
regularly, and the little girl would stay with her mother, of course; at
her age no other solution was possible. Emeline felt that she must know
how much expense she would be put to, and was gratified to find that it
would cost her not more than fifty dollars. The lawyer asked her how
soon she could get hold of her husband.

"Why, he'll let me know as soon as he's in town," Emeline said vaguely;
"he'll come home."

"Come home, eh?" said the lawyer, with a shrewd look. "He knows your
intentions, of course?"

"He ought to!" said Emeline with spirit, and she began again: "I don't
think there's a person in the world could say that I'm not a good wife,
Mr. Knowles! I never so much as looked at another man--I swear to God I
never did! And there's no other man in the case. If I can have my
dolling little girl, and just live quiet, with a few friends near me,
that's all I ask! If Mr. Page had his way, I'd never put foot out of
doors; but mind you, _he'd_ be off with the boys every night. And that
means drink, you know--"

"Well, well," the young lawyer said soothingly, "I guess you've been
treated pretty mean, all right."

Emeline went home to find--somewhat to her embarrassment--that George
had come in, and was in his happiest mood, and playing with Julia. Julia
had somehow lost her babyish beauty now; she was thin and lanky, four
teeth were missing, and even her glorious mop of hair seemed what her
mother called "slinky."

"I landed the Fox order right over Colton's head!" said George.

Emeline said: "I wish to the Lord you'd quit opening that window,
leaving the wind blow through here like a cave!"

"Well, the place smelled like a Jap's room!" George retorted, instantly
aggressive.

"We're going to the Park!" Julia chanted.

"How d'ye mean you're going to the Park?" Emeline asked, as she slammed
down the offending window.

"Well, I thought maybe I'd take her there; kinder fun walking round and
seeing things, what?" George submitted.

Emeline shrugged. "I don't care what you do!"

She sat down before a dresser with a triple mirror, which had lately
been added to the bedroom furniture, and began to ruffle the coarse
puffs of her black hair with slim, ringed fingers.

"You've got something better to do, of course!" George said.

"Don't go to a matinee, Mother!" said Julia, coming to lean coaxingly
against her mother's arm. Emeline looked down at the pale, intelligent
little face, and gave the child a sudden kiss.

"Mama isn't going to a matinee, doll baby. But papa ain't as crazy for
her to go to the Park as you are!" she said, with an oblique and
challenging glance at George.

"Oh, come on!" George urged impatiently. "Only don't wear that rotten
hat," he added. "It don't look like a respectable woman!"

Emeline's expression did not change, but fury seethed within her.

"Don't wait for me," she said levelly. "I'm not going."

"Well, put the kid's hat on then," George suggested, settling his own
with some care at the mantel mirror.

"Get your hand-embroidered dress out of your drawer, Julia," said her
mother, "and the hat Aunt Maybelle gave you!"

"I'm going to Cass's to telephone, and I need some cigarettes," George
announced from the door. "I'll be back in five minutes for Julie."

"Don't forget to get a drink while you're in Cass's," Emeline reminded
him, as she flung an embroidered dress over Julia's limp little draggled
petticoats. George's answer was a violent slamming of the hall door.

Julia's little face was radiant as her mother tied on a soiled white
straw bonnet covered with roses, and put a cologne-soaked handkerchief
into the pocket of her blue velvet coat. The little girl did not have
many pleasures; there were very few children in the neighbourhood, and
Julia was not very strong; she easily caught colds in dark O'Farrell
Street, or in the draughty hall. All winter long she had been hanging
over the coal fire in the front room, or leaning against the window
watching the busy street below--but today was spring! Sunlight glorified
even the dreary aspect from the windows above "J. Cassidy's" saloon, and
the glorious singing freshness of the breeze, the heavenly warmth of the
blue air, had reached Julia's little heart.

When she was quite dressed, and was standing at the window patiently
watching for her father, Emeline came and stood beside her.

"I'll tell you what!" said Emeline suddenly. "I'll go, too! It's too
grand to be indoors today; we'll just go out to the Park and take in the
whole show! And then perhaps papa'll take us somewhere to dinner!"

She began swiftly to dress, pinning on a hat that George liked, and
working on long gray kid gloves as a complement to a gray gown. Then she
came to stand behind Julia again, and both watched the street.

"I guess he's waiting for his change?" suggested Julia, and Emeline
laughed.

"We'll walk over and take the Geary Street car," said she. "We'll go
right to the fountain, and get dummy seats. And we could have dinner at
the Poodle Dog--"

"Here he comes!" Julia cried. And indeed George was to be seen for a
moment, between two friends, standing on the corner.

A long wait ensued. Then steps came up the stairs. Emeline, followed by
Julia, went to the door. It was not George, but a note from George,
delivered by Henny, of Cassidy's saloon.

"Dear Em," Emeline read, "a couple of the fellows want me to go to
Emeryville, have dinner at Tony's, and sit in a little game afterward.
Tell Julie I will take her to the Park to-morrow--and buy her anything
she wants. George."

"Thanks, Henny," Emeline said, without visible emotion. But Julia's lip
quivered, and she burst into bitter crying. Six-years-old knows no
tomorrows, and Julia tasted the bitterness of despair. She cried
quietly, her little body screwed into a big armchair, her face hidden in
the crook of a thin little arm. Emeline stood it as long as she could,
then she slapped and shook Julia to stop her, and Julia strangled and
shrieked hysterically.

Peace was presently restored, and Julia was asked if she would like to
go see her Auntie Mame, and assented with a hiccough. So her mottled
little face was wiped with a soggy gray towel, and her bonnet
straightened, and they set out.

Mrs. Povey was so sympathetic that Emeline stayed with her for dinner, a
casual meal which Myrtle Montague and a sister actress came in to share.
Julia sat with them at table, and stuffed solemnly on fresh bread and
cheese, crab salad and smoked beef, hot tomato sauce and delicious
coffee. The coffee came to table in a battered tin pot, and the cream
was poured into the cups from the little dairy bottle, with its metal
top, but Julia saw these things as little as any one else--as little as
she saw the disorderly welter of theatrical effects in the Poveys'
neglected rooms, the paint on the women's faces, the ugly violence and
coarseness of their talk.

But she did see that they were an impulsive, warm-hearted, generous set.
Nobody ever spoke crossly to her, she was given the freedom of their
rooms, she listened to their chatter, she was often caught up for
embraces heavy with cologne; they loved to dress her up in preposterous
costumes, and shouted with laughter at the sight of her in Dolly Varden
bonnets, Scotch kilts, or spectacles and wigs. "Baby doll," "Lovey," and
"Honey Babe" were Julia's names here, and she was a child hungry for
love and eager to earn it. To-night she ate her supper in that silence
so grateful to grown people, and afterward found some stage jewellery
and played with it until her head was too heavy to hold up any longer.
Then she went to sleep upon an odorous couch piled deep with all sorts
of odd garments, her feet thrust into a tangle of lifeless satin
pillows, her head upon the fur lining of some old cape, a banjo prodding
her uncomfortably whenever she stirred.

Julia--all pins and needles--was presently jerked up into a glare of
lights, and tied into the rose-crowned bonnet, and buttoned into the
velvet coat again. She had not been covered as she slept, and sneezed
and shivered in the cold night air. Emeline walked along briskly, and
Julia stumbled beside her. The child was in such an agony of fatigue and
chill that every separate step toward bed was dreaded by this time. She
fell against her mother, as Emeline tore off shoes and stockings,
stretched blundering, blind little arms for her nightgown sleeves, and
sank deliciously against her pillows, already more than half asleep.

But Emeline sat wide eyed, silent, waiting for George.

George did not come home at all that night. On the next
afternoon--Sunday afternoon--Julia was playing in the street with two
other small girls. Their game was simple. The three huddled into the
deep doorway that led to Julia's home, clinging tight to each other,
laughing and shouting. Then at a given signal they rushed screaming
forth, charged across the street as if pursued by a thousand furies, and
took shelter in a similar doorway, next to the saloon across the street.
This performance had been repeated, back and forth, perhaps a dozen
times, when Julia found her father waylaying her.

"Where y' going?" asked Julia, noticing that he carried a hand bag.

George sat down on the dirty cement steps that connected his dwelling
with the sidewalk, and drew Julia between his knees.

"I've got to go away, baby," said he soberly.

"And ain't choo going to take me to the Park--_never_?" asked Julia, with
a trembling lip.

George freed a lock of her hair that had gotten caught in her collar,
with clumsy, gentle fingers.

"Mama's mad at me, and I'm going away for a while, Babe," said he,
clearing his throat. "But you be a good girl, and I'll come take you to
the Park some day."

Something in the gravity of his tone impressed Julia.

"But I don't want you to go away," she said tearfully. George got up
hastily.

"Come on, walk with Pop to the car," he commanded, and Julia trotted
contentedly beside him to Market Street. There she gave him a child's
soft, impersonal kiss, staring up at the buildings opposite as she did
so. George jumped on a cable car, wedged his bag under his knees as he
took a seat on the dummy, and looked back at the little figure that was
moving toward the dingy opening of O'Farrell Street, and at the spring
sunshine, bright on the child's hair.




CHAPTER II

In summer the rear parlour that was Mrs. Page's bedroom was a rather dim
and dreary place; such light as it had fell through one long, high
window that gave only upon a narrow air shaft; it was only in mid-July
that the actual sunlight--a bright and fleeting triangle--touched the
worn red carpet and the curly-maple bed. In winter the window gave
almost no light at all. Julia dressed by gaslight ten months out of the
year, and had to sit up in her warm blankets and stare at the clock on a
certain January morning in her fifteenth year, to make sure whether it
said twenty minutes of eleven or five minutes of eight o'clock. It was
five minutes of eight--no mistake about it--but eight o'clock was early
for the Pages, mother and daughter. Julia sighed, and cautiously
stretched forth an arm, a bare, shapely little arm, with bangles on the
round wrist and rings on the smooth fingers, and picked a book from the
floor. Cautiously settling herself on the pillows she plunged into her
novel, now and then pushing back a loose strand of hair, or bringing her
pretty fingernails close to her eyes for an admiring and critical
scrutiny.

An hour passed--another hour. The clock in the front room struck a
silvery ten. Then Julia slammed her book noisily together, and gave a
sharp push to the recumbent form beside her.

"Ah--no--darling!" moaned Mrs. Page, tortured out of dreams.
"Don't--Julie--"

"Aw, wake up, Mama!" the daughter urged. Whereupon the older woman
rolled on her back, yawned luxuriously, and said, quite composedly:

"Hello, darling! What time is it?"

Emeline had aged in seven years; she looked hopelessly removed from
youth and beauty now, but later in the day, when her hair would be taken
out of its crimping kids, her sallow cheeks touched with rouge, and her
veined neck covered by a high collar, a coral chain, and an
ostrich-feather ruff, some traces of her former good looks might be
visible. She still affected tight corsets, high heels, enormous hats.
But Emeline's interest in her own appearance was secondary now to her
fierce pride and faith in Julia's beauty. Drifting along the line of
least resistance, asking only to be comfortable and to have a good time,
Emeline had come to a bitter attitude of resentment toward George,
toward the fate that had "forced" her to leave him. Now she began lazily
to fasten upon Julia as the means of gratifying those hopes and
ambitions that were vain for herself. Julia was beautiful, Julia would
be a great success, and some day would repay her mother for the
sacrifices she had made for her child.

Emeline dressed, went about, flirted, and gossiped still; she liked
cocktails and cards and restaurant dinners; she was an authority on all
things theatrical; her favourite pose was that of the martyred mother.
"All I have left," Emeline would say, kissing her daughter effectively,
before strangers. "And only God knows what it has cost me to keep my
girlie with me!"

Julia would grin good-naturedly at this. She had no hallucinations about
her mother. She knew her own value, knew she was pretty, and was glad
with the simple and pathetic complacence of fourteen. Julia at eight had
gone to dancing school, in the briefest skirts ever seen on a small
girl, and the dirtiest white silk stockings. She had sung a shrill
little song, and danced a little dance at a public benefit for the
widows of three heroic firemen, when she was only nine. Her lovely mop
had been crimped out of all natural wave; her youthful digestion menaced
by candy and chewing gum; her naturally rather sober and pensive
disposition completely altered, or at least eclipsed. Julia could
chatter of the stage, could give a pert answer to whoever accosted her,
could tell a dressmaker exactly how she wanted a gown made, at twelve.
While her mother slept in the morning, before the girl learned to sleep
late, too, the child would get up and slip out. Her playground was
O'Farrell Street, dry and hot in summer, wrapped in soft fog four
mornings a week the year round, reeking of stale beer, and echoing to
the rattle of cable cars. The little Julia flitted about everywhere:
watching janitors as they hosed down the sidewalks outside the saloons,
or rinsed cuspidors; watching grocers set out their big signs for the
day; watching little restaurants open, and first comers sit down to
great cups of coffee and plates of hot cakes. Perhaps the sight of food
would remind the little girl of her own empty stomach; she would
straggle home just as the first sunshine was piercing the fog, and
loiter upstairs, and peep into the bedroom to see what the chances of a
meal might be.

Emeline usually rolled over to smile at her daughter when she heard the
door open, and Julia would be sent to the delicatessen store for the
component parts of a substantial meal. Julia loved the cramped, clean,
odorous shop that smelled of wet wood and mixed mustard pickles and
smoked fish. A little cream bottle would be filled from an immense can
at her request, the shopkeeper's wife wiping it with a damp rag and a
bony hand. And the pat of butter, and the rolls, and the sliced ham, and
the cheese--Herr Bauer scratched their prices with a stubby pencil on an
oily bit of paper, checked their number by the number of bundles, gave
Julia the buttery change, and Julia hurried home for a delicious
loitering breakfast with her mother. Emeline, still in her limp,
lace-trimmed nightgown, with a spotted kimono hanging loosely over it,
and her hair a wildly tousled mass at the top of her head, presided at a
clear end of the kitchen table. She and Julia occupied only two rooms of
the original apartment now; a young lawyer, with his wife and child, had
the big front room, and the dining-room was occupied by two mysterious
young men who came and went for years without ever betraying anything of
their own lives to their neighbours. Julia only knew that they were
young, quiet, hard working, and of irreproachable habits.

But she knew the people in the front room quite well. Mrs. Raymond
Toomey was a neat, bright, hopeful little woman, passionately devoted to
her husband and her spoiled, high-voiced little son. Raymond Toomey was
a big, blustering fool of a man, handsome in a coarse sort of way,
noisy, shallow, and opinionated. Whenever there were races, the Toomeys
went to the races, taking the precocious "Lloydy," in his velvet
Fauntleroy suit and tasselled shoes, and taking "Baby," a shivering
little terrier with wet, terrified eyes. Sometimes Mrs. Toomey came out
to the kitchen in the morning, to curl her ostrich feathers over the gas
stove, or join Mrs. Page in a cup of coffee.

"God, girlie, that goes to the spot," she would yawn, stirring her cup,
both elbows on the table. "We had a fierce day yesterday, and Ray took a
little too much last night--you know how men are! He had a stable tip
yesterday, and went the limit--like a fool! I play hunches--there's no
such thing as a tip!"

And sometimes she would put a little printed list of entries before
Julia and say:

"Pick me a winner, darling. Go on--just pick any one!"

Julia soon reached the age when she could get her own breakfast, and
then, mingled with a growing appreciation of the girl's beauty, her
mother felt that gratitude always paid by an indolent person to one of
energy. She knew that her child was finer than she was, prettier, more
clever, more refined. She herself had never had any reserves; she had
always screamed or shouted or cried or run away when things crossed her,
but she saw Julia daily displaying self-control and composure such as
she had never known. There were subtleties in Julia: her sweet firm
young mouth closed over the swift-coming words she would not say, her
round, round blue eyes were wiser already than her mother's eyes.

The girl had grown very handsome. Her joyous, radiant colouring was
contradicted by her serious expression, her proud, unsmiling mouth. Her
eyes were dark, her colouring softly dark; she had the velvety, tawny
skin that usually accompanies dark hair. Yet her hair was a pure and
exquisite gold. She wore it fluffed over her ears, cut in a bang across
her forehead, and "clubbed" on her neck, in a rather absurd and
artificial fashion. But the effect of her grave little face and severe
expression, with this opulent gold, and her red lips and round blue
eyes, was very piquant. Even powder, earrings, and "clubbing" her hair
did not rob Julia of the appearance of a sweet, wilful, and petulant
child. Besides the powder and earrings, she indulged in cologne, in
open-work silk stockings and high heels, in chains and rings and
bracelets; she wore little corsets, at fourteen, and laced them tight.

Julia's mind, at this time, was a curious little whirlpool. She had the
natural arrogance of her years; she felt that she had nothing to learn.
She had an affectionate contempt for her mother, and gave advice more
often than she accepted it from Emeline. Julia naturally loved order and
cleanliness, but she never came in contact with them. Emeline sometimes
did not air or make her bed for weeks at a time. She washed only such
dishes as were absolutely necessary for the next meal. She never sent
out a bundle to the laundry, but washed handkerchiefs and some underwear
herself, at erratic intervals, drying them on windows, or the backs of
various chairs. Emeline always had a pair or more of silk stockings
soaking in a little bowl of cold suds in the bedroom, and occasionally
carried a waist or a lace petticoat to the little French laundress on
Powell Street, and drove a sharp bargain with her. Julia accepted the
situation very cheerfully; she and her mother both enjoyed their lazy,
aimless existence, and to Julia, at least, the future was full of hope.
She could do any one of a dozen things that would lead to fame and
fortune.

The particular day that opened for her with two hours of quiet reading
progressed like any other day. The mother and daughter arose, got their
breakfast in the kitchen, and sat long over it, sharing the papers, the
hot coffee, the cream, and dividing evenly the little French loaf.
Julia's nightgown was as limp as her mother's, her kimono as dirty, and
her feet were thrust in fur slippers, originally white, now gray. But
her fresh young colour, and the rich loops and waves of her golden hair,
her firm young breasts under her thin wraps, and the brave blue of her
eyes made her a very different picture from her mother, who sat
opposite, a vision of disorder, feasting her eyes upon the girl.

There was a murder story, of which mother and daughter read every word,
and a society wedding to discuss.

"The Chases went," said Julia, dipping her bread in her coffee, her eyes
on the paper. "Isn't that the limit!"

"Why, Marian Chase was a bridesmaid, Julie!"

"Yes, I know. But I didn't think the Byron Chases would go to Maude
Pennell's wedding! But of course she's marrying an Addison--that helps.
'Mrs. Byron Chase, lavender brocade and pearls,'" read Julia. "Well,
Maude Pennell is getting in, all right!"

"What'd Mrs. Joe Coutts wear?" Emeline asked. Among the unknown members
of the city's smartest set she had her favourites.

"'Mrs. Joseph Foulke Coutts,'" Julia read obligingly. '"Red velvet robe
trimmed with fox.'"

"For heaven's sake, Julie--with that red face!"

"And Miss Victoria Coutts in pink silk--she's had that dress for a year
now," Julia said. "Well, Lord!" She yawned luxuriously. "I wouldn't
marry Roy Addison if he was made of money--the bum!" She pushed the
paper carelessly aside. "What you going to do to-day, Ma?" she asked
lazily.

"Oh, go out," Emeline answered vaguely, still reading a newspaper
paragraph. "Gladys has had to pay over a quarter of a million for that
feller's debts!" said she, awed.

"Well, that's what you get for marrying a duke," Julia answered
scornfully. "Let's pile these, Ma, and get dressed."

They went into the bedroom, where the gas was lighted again, the bureau
pushed out from the wall, that the mirror might catch the best light,
and where, in unspeakable confusion, mother and daughter began to dress.
Julia put on her smart little serge skirt, pushing it down over her hips
with both hands. Then she fixed her hair carefully, adjusted her hat,
tied on a spotted white veil, and finally slipped into a
much-embroidered silk shirtwaist, which mother and daughter decided was
dirty, but would "do." Rings, bangles, and chains followed, a pair of
long limp gloves, a final powdering, and a ruff of pink feathers. Julia
was not fifteen and looked fully seventeen, to her great delight. She
gave herself a sober yet approving glance in the mirror; the corners of
her firm yet babyish mouth twitched with pleasure.

She locked the doors, set an empty milk bottle out on the unspeakably
dreary back stairway, and flung the soggy bedding over the foot of the
bed. Then mother and daughter sauntered out into the noontime sunshine.

It was their happiest time, as free and as irresponsible as children
they went forth to meet the day's adventures. Something was sure to
happen, the "crowd" would have some plan; they rarely came home again
before midnight. But this sunshiny start into the day Was most pleasant
of all, its freshness, its potentialities, appealed to them both. It was
a February day, warm and bright, yet with a delicious tingle in the air.

"Leave us go up to Min's, Julie; some of the girls are sure to be there.
There's no mat. to-day."

"Well--" Julia was smiling aimlessly at the sunlight. Now she patted
back a yawn. "Walk?"

"Oh, sure. It's lovely out."

It was tacitly understood that Julia was to be an actress some day, when
she was older, and the boarding-house of Mrs. Minnie Tarbury, to which
the Pages were idly sauntering, was inhabited almost entirely by
theatrical folk. Emeline and Julia were quite at home in the shabby
overcrowded house in Eddy Street, and to-day walked in at the basement
door, under a flight of wooden stairs that led to the parlour floor, and
surprised the household at lunch in the dark, bay-windowed front room.

Mrs. Tarbury, a large, uncorseted woman, presided. Her boarders, girls
for the most part, were scattered down the long table. Luncheon was
properly over, but the girls were still gossiping over their tea. Flies
buzzed in the sunny window, and the rumpled tablecloth was covered with
crumbs. Mrs. Tarbury kissed Mrs. Page, and Julia settled down between
two affectionate chorus girls.

"You know you're getting to be the handsomest thing that ever lived,
Ju!" said one of these. Julia smiled without raising her eyes from the
knives and forks with which she was absently playing.

"She's got the blues to-day," said her mother. "Not a word out of her!"

"Is that right, Ju?" somebody asked solicitously.

"Just about as right as Mama ever gets it," the girl said, still with
her indifferent smile. Because her mother was shallow and violent, she
had learned to like a pose of silence, of absent-mindedness, and
because of the small yet sufficient income afforded by the rented rooms
and from alimony, Julia was removed from the necessity that drove these
other girls to the hard and constant work of the stage, and could afford
her favourite air of fastidious waiting. She was going to be an actress,
yes, but not until some plum worthy of her beauty and youth was offered.
Meanwhile she listened to the others, followed the history of the
favourites of the stage eagerly, and never saw less than four shows a
week. Julia, at Juliet's age, had her own ideas as to the interpretation
of the Balcony Scene, and could tell why she thought the art of Miss
Rehan less finished than that of Madame Modjeska. But personally she
lacked ambition, in this direction at least.

However, she joined in the girls' talk with great zest; a manager was to
be put in his place, and several theories were advanced as to his
treatment.

"I swear to God if Max don't give me twenty lines in the next, I'll go
on to New York," said a Miss Connie Girard dispassionately. "There's a
party I know there rents a house that Frohman owns, and he'd give me a
letter. What I want is a Broadway success."

"That time we played--you know, seven weeks running, in Portland," said
a stout, aging actress, "the time my little dance made such a hit, you
know--"

"Mind jer, Max never come near us this morning," interrupted a Miss Rose
Ransome firmly. "Because he knew what he done, and he wasn't looking for
trouble! He wrote a notice--"

"One of the Portland papers, in c'menting on the show--" the dancer
resumed.

"Say, Julie, want to walk down to Kearney with me?" Miss Girard said,
jumping up. "I want to get my corsets, and we might drop in and see if
we can work Foster for some seats for to-night."

"I've got a date to-night," said Julia, with a glance at her mother.

"What's that?" Emeline said sharply.

"Why, Mama, I told you I was going to the Orpheum with the Rosenthals--"

"She's going with the whole bunch," Mrs. Page commented, with a shrug.
"I can't stand them, but she can!"

"I think Mark Rosenthal's a darling," some girl said, "I want to tell
you right now there's not anybody can play the piano as good as he can."

"That's right," Julia said, very low.

"Well, excuse me from the bunch!" Mrs. Page said lazily.

"But we've got a real pretty little blush, just the same!" Mrs. Tarbury
said, smiling at Julia. The girls shouted, and Julia grew still more
red. "Never mind, baby love!" said the older woman soothingly. "It's
just Aunt Min's nonsense! Say, but listen, Julia!" Her tone grew
suddenly intense. "I meant to ask you something--listen. Say, no
fooling, Artheris wants to know if you would take a job."

"Twenty a week, and twenty towns a month," Julia said, still ruffled.
"No, I would not!"

"No, this isn't anything like that, dearie," explained Mrs. Tarbury.
"There's going to be a big amachure show for charity at the Grand next
month, and they want a few professionals in it, to buck up the others.
All the swells are going to be in it--it's going to be something
elegant! Of course they'd pay something, and it'd be a lot of fun for
you! Artheris wants you to do it, and it wouldn't hurt you none to have
him on your side, Julia. I promised I'd talk to you."

"One performance?" Julia asked. "What play?"

"I'd do it in a minute," said the stout actress from Portland, whose
dance had been so gratifying a success, "but I'm signed up."

"One night, dear," Mrs. Tarbury said. "I don't think they've decided on
the play."

"I don't know," Julia hesitated. "What d'ye think, Mama?"

"I think he's got his gall along," Mrs. Page admitted. "One night!--and
to learn the whole thing for that. I'll tell you what to tell him--you
tell him this: you say that you can't do it for one cent less'n a
hundred dollars!"

"Lay down, Towse!" said Connie Girard, and Mrs. Tarbury expressed the
same incredulity as she said benevolently: "What a pipe dream, Em--she's
lucky if she gets ten!"

"Ten!" squeaked Julia's mother, but Julia silenced her by saying
carelessly:

"I'll tell you what, Aunt Min. If Con and I get through in time we'll go
in and see Artheris to-day. I'd do it for twenty-five--"

"You would not!" said her mother.

"Well, you might get twenty-five," Mrs. Tarbury said, mollified, "if
it's a long part."

"If it don't take a lot of dressing," Julia said thoughtfully, as she
and Miss Girard powdered their noses at the dark mirror of the
sideboard.

"Don't you be fool enough to do it for a cent under fifty," Emeline
said.

Julia smiled at her vaguely, and added to her farewells a daughterly,
"Your hat's all right, Mama, but your veil's sort of caught up over your
ear. Fix it before you go out. We'll be back here at five--"

"Or we'll meet you at Monte's,'" said Connie.

The two girls walked briskly down Eddy Street, conscious of their own
charms, and conscious of the world about them. Connie was nearly
nineteen, a simple, happy little flirt, who had been in and out of love
constantly for three or four years. Julia knew her very well, and
admired her heartily. Connie had twice had a speaking part in the past
year, and the younger girl felt her to be well on her way toward fame.
Miss Girard's family of plain, respectable folk lived in Stockton, and
were somewhat distressed by her choice of a vocation, but Connie was
really a rather well-behaved girl,--and a safe adviser for Julia.

"Say, listen, Con," said Julia, presently, "you know Mark Rosenthal?"

"Sure," said Connie. "Look here, Ju!" She paused at a window. "Don't you
think these Chinese hand bags are swell!"

"Grand. But listen, Con," said Julia, shamefacedly honest as a boy.
"He's got a case on me----"

"On you?" echoed Connie. "Why, he's twenty!"

"I know it," Julia agreed.

"But, my Lord, Ju, your Mother won't stand for that!"

"Mama don't know it."

"Well, I don't think you ought to do that, Ju," Connie began gravely.
But Julia, with sudden angry tears in her eyes, stopped her.

"I've _not_ done anything!" she said crossly. And suddenly Connie saw the
truth: that Julia, in spite of paint and powder, rings and "clubbed"
hair, was only a little girl, after all, still unsexed, still young
enough to resent being teased about boys.

"What's he do?" she asked presently.

"Well, he--he--I have supper with them sometimes"--Julia's words poured
out eagerly--"and he'll kiss me, you know--"

"_Kiss_ you! The nerve!"

"Oh, before them all, I mean--like he always has done. His mother just
laughs. And then, last week, when he asked me to go to Morosco's with
them, why, it was just us two--the others had gone somewhere else."

"Well, of all gall!" said Connie, absorbed.

"And I've been up there with him thousands of times," said Julia. "Maybe
Hannah'd be there, or Sophy, but sometimes we'd be alone--while he was
playing the piano, you know."

"Well, now you look-a-here, Julie," said Connie impressively, "you cut
out that being alone business, and the kissing, too. And now how about
to-night? Are you sure his whole family is going to-night?"

"Well, that's just it, I'm not," Julia confessed, flattered by Connie's
interest.

"Then you don't go one step, my dear; just you fool him a bunch! You see
you're like a little boy, Ju: kisses don't mean nothing to you, _yet_. But
you'll get a crush some day yourself, and then you'll feel like a fool
if you've got mixed up with the wrong one--see?"

"Sure," said Julia, hoarse and embarrassed. Yet she liked the sensation
of being scolded by Connie, too, and tried shyly, as the conversation
seemed inclined to veer toward Connie's own affairs, to bring it back to
her own.

The little matter of the corsets being settled, they sauntered through
the always diverting streets toward the office of Leopold Artheris,
manager of the Grand Opera House, and a very good friend of both girls.

They found him idle, in a bright, untidy office, lined with the pictures
of stage favourites, and with three windows open to the sun and air.

"You're placed, I think, Miss Girard?" said he, giving her a fat little
puffy hand. He was a stout, short man of fifty, with a bald spot showing
under a mop of graying curls, and a bushy moustache also streaked with
gray.

"If you call it placed," said Connie, grinning. "We open Monday in
Sacramento."

"Aha! But why Sacramento?"

"Oh, we've got to open somewhere, I suppose! Try it out on the dog, you
know!" Connie said, with a sort of bored airiness.

"And you, my dear?" said Artheris, turning toward Julia.

"She's come to see you about that amachure job," said Connie, reaching
over to grab a theatrical magazine from the desk, and running her eye
carelessly over its pages. Artheris's blandly smiling face underwent an
instant change. He elevated his eyebrows, pursed his lips, and nodded
with sudden interest.

"Oh--to be sure--to be sure! The performance of 'The Amazons' for the
Hospital--yes, well! And what do you think of it, Miss Page?" he said.

Julia stretched out her little feet before her, shrugged, and brought an
indifferent eye to bear upon the manager.

"What's there in it?" she asked.

"Well, now, _that_ you'd have to settle with them," smiled Mr. Artheris.

"Oh, rot!" said Connie cheerfully. "_You_ manage that for her; what does
_she_ know? Go on!"

"But, my dear young lady, _I_ have nothing to do with it!" the man
protested. "They come to me and wish to hire my theatre, lights, ushers,
orchestra, and so, and they ask me if I know of a young actress who will
take a part--to give them all confidence, you see"--he made encouraging
gestures with his fat little hands--"to--to carry the performance, as
it were!"

"What part?" asked Connie shrewdly.

"The part of--of--a splendid part, that of the Sergeant," said Artheris
cheerfully.

"Yes, I know that part," Connie said grimly.

"The idea is to have Miss Julie here understudy all the parts," said the
manager quickly. "These amateurs are very apt to disappoint, do you see?
They feel that there would be a sense of security in having a
professional right there to fill in a gap."

"Why, that would mean she'd have to learn practically the whole play,"
said Connie. "They ought to be willing to pay a good price for that. Of
course Miss Page is only seventeen," she continued, a calculating eye on
Julia, whose appearance did not belie the statement.

"No objection at all--they are all very young! Come now, what do you
say, Miss Page?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Julia discontentedly. "I'm not so crazy about
acting," she went on childishly. "I'm not so sure I want all these
swells to stand around and impose on me--" She hesitated, uncertain and
vague. "And I don't believe Mama'd be so anxious," she submitted lamely.

Just then the door of Mr. Artheris's office was opened, and a man put in
his head. He was a young man, tall, thin, faultlessly dressed, and
possessed of an infectious smile.

"Excuse me, Mr. Artheris," beamed the intruder, "but could I have a look
at the stage? Far be it from me to interrupt or any little thing like
that," he continued easily, "but my Mother'd have me dragged out and
shot if I came home without seeing it!"

"Come in, come in, Mr. Hazzard," said Artheris cordially; "you're just
the man we want to see! Miss Girard--Miss Page--Mr. Hazzard. Mr. Hazzard
is managing this very affair--manager, isn't that it?"

"God knows what I am!" said Carter Hazzard, mopping his forehead, and
appreciative of Miss Page's beauty and the maturer charms of Miss
Girard. "I'm bell-hop for the whole crowd. My sister plays Thomasine,
her steady is Tweenwayes, and my Mother's a director in the hospital.
Fix it up to suit yourselves; you'll see that I'm every one's goat."

Both the girls laughed, and Artheris said:

"I am glad you came in, for Miss Page is the young lady of whom I spoke
to you. Unfortunately, it seems that she has just promised to sign a
contract with the Alcazar people."

"Oh, shucks! Can't you put it off until after the fifteenth?" asked Mr.
Hazzard in alarm.

"Too much money in it," Connie said, shaking her head.

"Well--well, we expected to--to pay, of course," Carter said,
embarrassed at this crudeness. And Julia, blushing furiously, muttered,
"Oh--it wasn't the _pay_!"

"In a word, Miss Page's price is twenty-five dollars a night," said
Artheris. "Could your people pay it?"

"Why--why, I suppose we could," Hazzard said uncomfortably. "It's--it's
for a charity, you know," he ended weakly.

"Well, Miss Page's usual price is fifty; she's already reduced it half!"
Connie said briskly.

Julia was now bitterly ashamed of her manager and her friend; her face
was burning.

"I'll do it, of course," she promised. "And we'll arrange the terms
afterward!"

"Good work!" said Hazzard gayly. In a few moments, when they all went
out to look at the stage, he dropped behind the others and began to walk
beside her.

"You're sure you're old enough to be on the stage, Miss Page; no Gerry
Society scandal at the last minute?" he asked banteringly. "You look
about twelve!"

Julia flashed him an oblique look.

"The idea! I'm nearly seventeen!" she said, with an uncertain little
laugh. His ardent eyes embarrassed her.

"Honest?" said Carter Hazzard, in a low, caressing tone. He laid his
fingers on her arm. "What's your hurry?" he asked.

"We ought to keep with the others," Julia stammered, scarlet cheeked but
half laughing. At the same instant his inclination to cut across her
path brought her to a full stop. She backed against a heavily tasselled
and upholstered old armchair that chanced to be standing in the wings,
and sitting down on one of its high arms, looked straight up into his
eyes. The others had gone on; they were alone in the draughty wings.

"Why ought we?" said Hazzard, still in a low voice full of significance,
his eyes on her shoulder, where he straightened a ruffle that was caught
under a chain of beads. "If you like me and I like you, why shouldn't we
have a little talk?"

However young she might appear, the inanities of a flirtation were a
familiar field to Julia. She gave him a demure and unsmiling glance from
between curled lashes, and said:

"What would you like to talk about?"

By this time their faces were close together; a sort of heady lightness
in the atmosphere set them both to laughing foolishly; their voices
trembled on uncertain notes. An exhilarating sense of her own sex and
charm thrilled Julia; she knew that he found her sweet and young and
wonderful.

"I'd like to talk about _you_!" said Carter Hazzard. Julia found his
audacity delightful; she began to feel that she could not keep up with
the dazzling rush of his repartee. "You know, the minute I saw you--" he
added.

"Now, _don't_ tell me I'm pretty!" Julia begged, with another flashing
look.

"No--no!" the man exclaimed, discarding mere beauty with violence.
"Pretty! Lord! what does prettiness matter? Of course you're pretty, but
do you know what I said to myself the minute I saw you? I said, 'I'll
bet that little girl has _brains_!' You smile," said Mr. Hazzard, with
passionate earnestness, "but I'll swear to God I did!"

"Oh, you just want me to believe that!" scoffed Julia, dimpling.

What they said, however, mattered as little as what might be said by the
two occupants of a boat that was drifting swiftly toward rapids.

"Why do you think an unkind thing like that?" Carter asked
reproachfully.

"Was that unkind?" Julia countered innocently. At which Mr. Hazzard
observed irrelevantly, in a low voice:

"Do you know you're absolutely fascinating? Do you? You're just the kind
of little girl I want to know--to be friends with--to have for a pal!"

Julia was quite wise enough to know that whatever qualifications she
possessed for this pleasing position could hardly have made themselves
evident to Mr. Hazzard during their very brief acquaintance, and she was
not a shade more sincere than he as she answered coquettishly:

"Yes, that's what they all say! And then they--" She stopped.

"And then they--what?" breathed Carter, playing with the loose ribbons
of her feather boa.

"Then they fall in love with me!" pouted the girl, raising round eyes.

Carter was intoxicated at this confession, and laughed out loud.

"But you're too young to play at falling in love!" he warned her. "How
old are you--seventeen? And you haven't told me your name yet?"

"You know my name is Miss Page," smiled Julia.

"And do you think I'm going to call you that?" Carter reproached her.

"It might be Jane," she suggested.

"Yes, but it isn't, you little devil!" Suddenly the man caught both her
wrists, and Julia got on her feet, and instinctively flung back her
head. "You're going to kiss me for that!" he said, half laughing, half
vexed.

"Oh, no, I'm not!" A sudden twist of her body failed to free her, and
the plume on her hat brushed his cheek.

"Oh, yes, you are!" He caught both wrists in one of his strong hands,
and put his arm about her shoulders like a vise, turning her face toward
him at the same time. Julia, furious with the nervous fear that this
scuffling would be overheard, and that Carter would make her ridiculous,
glared at him, and they remained staring fixedly at each other for a few
moments.

"You _dare_!" she whispered then, held so tightly that Carter could hear
her heart beat, "and I'll scream loud enough to bring every one in the
place!"

"All right--you little cat!" he laughed, freeing her suddenly. Julia
tossed her head and walked off without speaking, but presently an
oblique swift glance at him showed his expression to be all penitent and
beseeching; their eyes met, and they both laughed. Still laughing, they
came upon Artheris and Connie, and all walked out together on the
deserted stage.

The great empty arch was but dimly lighted, draughty, odorous, and
gloomy. Beyond the extinguished footlights they could see the curved
enormous cavern of the house, row upon row of empty seats. In the
orchestra box two or three men, one in his coat sleeves, were disputing
over an opera score. High up in the topmost gallery some one was
experimenting with the calcium machine; a fan of light occasionally
swept the house, or a man's profile was silhouetted against a sputter of
blue flame.

Artheris and young Hazzard paced the stage, consulted, and disagreed.
Connie practised a fancy step in a wide circle, her skirt caught up, her
face quite free of self-consciousness. Julia sat on a box, soberly
looking from face to face.

Something had happened to her, she did not yet know what. She was
frightened, yet strangely bold; she experienced delicious chills, yet
her cheeks were on fire. Love of life flooded her whole being in waves;
she was wrapped, lulled, saturated, in a new and dreamy peace.

Julia felt a sudden warm rush of affection for Connie--dear old Con--the
best friend a girl ever had! She looked about the theatre; how she loved
the old "Grand!" Above all possible conditions in life it was wonderful
to be Julia Page, sitting here, the very hub of the world, a being to
love and be loved.

There, at that hour, she came to that second birth all women know; she
was born into that world of drifting sweet odours, blending and
iridescent colours, evasive and enchanting sounds, that is the kingdom
of the heart. Julia did not know why, from this hour on, she was no
longer a little girl, she was no longer dumb and blind and unseeing. But
a new and delightful consciousness woke within her, a new sense of her
own importance, her own charm.

When she and Connie strolled out again, it was, for Julia at least, into
a changed world. The immortal hour of romance touched even sordid
Mission Street with gold. Julia walked demurely, but conscious of every
admiring glance she won from the passers-by, conscious of a score of
swallows taking flight from a curb, conscious of the pathetic beauty of
the little draggled mother wheeling home her sleepy baby, the setting
sunlight glittering in the eyes of both.

"He's nothing but a big spoiled kid, if you want to know what I think,"
said Connie, ending a long dissertation to which Julia had only half
listened.

"He--who?" asked Julia, suddenly recalled from dreams, and feeling her
heart turn liquid within her. A weakness seized her knees, a delicious
chill ran up her spine.

"Hazzard--the smarty!" Connie elucidated carelessly.

"Oh, sure!" Julia said heavily. She made no further comment.

She and Connie wandered in and out of a few shops, asking prices, and
fingering laces and collars. They went into the dim, echoing old library
on Post Street, to powder their noses at the mirror downstairs; they
went into the music store at Sutter and Kearney, and listened for a few
moments to a phonograph concert; they bought violets--ten cents for a
great bunch--at the curb market about Lotta's fountain.

The sweetness of the dying spring day flooded the city, and its very
essence pierced Julia's heart with a vague pain that was a pleasure,
too. Presently she and Connie walked to California Street, and climbed a
steep block or two to the Maison Montiverte.

Julia and her mother, and a large proportion of their acquaintances,
dined chez Montiverte perhaps a hundred times a year. There was a
regular twenty-five-cent dinner that was extremely good, there was a
fifty-cent dinner fit for a king, and there were specialties de la
maison, as, for example, a combination salad at twenty cents that was a
meal in itself. Irrespective of the other order, the guest of the Maison
Montiverte was regaled with boiled shrimps or crabs' legs while he
waited for his dinner, was eagerly served with all the delicious French
bread and butter that he could eat, and had a little cup of superb black
coffee without charge to finish his meal. Brilliant piano music swept
the rooms whenever any guest cared to send the waiter with a five-cent
piece to the old mechanical piano, and sprightly conversation, carried
on from table to table, gave the place that tone that Monsieur
Montiverte considered to be its most valuable asset. Monsieur himself
was a dried-up little rat of a man, grizzled, and as brown as a walnut.
Madame was large and superb and young, smooth faced, brown haired, regal
in manner. It was said that Madame had had a predecessor, a lady now
living in France, whose claim upon Jules Montiverte was still valid.
However that might be, it did not seem to worry Jules, nor his calm and
lovely companion, nor their two daughters, black-eyed baby girls, whose
heavy straight hair was crimped at the ends into bands of brownish-black
fuzz, and who wore white stockings and tasselled boots, and flounced,
elaborately embroidered white dresses on Sundays. Whatever their bar
sinister, the Montivertes flourished and grew rich, and a suspicion of
something irregular, some high-handed disposition of the benefit of
clergy, helped rather than hurt their business.

Julia and Connie were early to-night, and took their regular places at a
long table that was as yet surrounded only by empty chairs. Madame, who
was feeding bread and milk to a black-eyed three-year-old at a little
table in a corner, nodded a welcome, and a young Frenchwoman, putting
her head in through a swinging door at the back, nodded, too, and said,
showing a double row of white teeth:

"Wait--een?"

"Yes, we'll wait for the others!" Connie called back. She and Julia
nibbled French bread, and played with their knives and forks while they
waited.

The dining-room had that aspect of having been made for domestic and
adapted to general use that is so typically un-American, yet so dear to
the American heart. An American manager would have torn down partitions,
papered in brown cartridge, curtained in pongee, and laid a hardwood
floor. Monsieur Montiverte left the two drawing-rooms as they were: a
shabby red carpet was under foot, stiff Nottingham curtains filtered the
bright sunlight, and an old-fashioned paper in dull arabesques of green
and brown and gold made a background for framed dark engravings,
"Franklin at the Court of France," and "The Stag at Bay," and other
pictures of their type. The tablecloths were coarse, the china and glass
heavy, and the menus were written in blue indelible pencil, in a curly
French hand. From the windows at the back one could look out upon an
iron-railed balcony, a garden beyond, and the old, brick, balconied
houses of the Chinese quarter. At the left the California Street cable
car climbed the hill, and the bell tower of old St. Mary's rose sombre
and dignified against the soft sunset sky. At the right were the Park,
with a home-going tide pouring through it at this hour, and Kearney
Street with its jangling car bells, and below, the square roofs of the
warehouse district, and the spire of the ferry building, and the bay
framed in its rim of hills. Montiverte owned the house in which he
conducted his business; it was one of the oldest in the city, built by
the French pioneers who were the first to erect permanent homes in the
new land. This had been the fashionable part of town in 1860, but its
stately old homes were put to strange uses in these days.
Boarding-houses of the lowest class, shops, laundries, saloons, and such
restaurants as Jules Montiverte's overran the district; the Chinese
quarter pressed hard upon one side, and what was always called the "bad"
part of town upon the other. Yet only two blocks away, straight up the
hill, were some of San Francisco's most beautiful homes, the brownstone
mansion, then the only one in California, that some homesick Easterner
built at fabulous cost, the great house that had been recently given for
an institute of art, and the homes of two or three of the railroad
kings.

Patrons of Montiverte began to saunter in by twos and threes. Some of
these the girls knew, and saluted familiarly; others were strangers, and
ignored, and made to feel as uncomfortable as possible. Julia's beauty
was always the object of notice, and she loved to appear entirely
unconscious of it, to sparkle and chatter as if no eyes were upon her.
Emeline came in, with one or two older women, and Julia looked up from a
great bowl of soup to nod to her.

"Sign up?" asked Emeline languidly. And two or three strangers,
obviously impressed by the term, waited for the answer.

"Oh, I guess I'll do it to please Artheris!" Julia said. The girl was
fairly aglow to-night, palpitating and thrilling with youth and the joy
of life. Everything distracted her--everything amused her--yet now and
then she found a quiet moment in which to take out her little memories
of the afternoon, and to review them with a curiously palpitating heart.

"If you like me and I like you ... I want to talk about you ... do you
know you're absolutely fascinating? ... you're going to kiss me for
that! ..." She could still hear his voice, feel his arm about her.

Somebody producing free seats for the Alcazar Theatre, Julia allowed
herself to drift along with the crowd. They were late for the
performance, but nobody cared; they had all seen it before, and after
commenting on it in a way that somewhat annoyed their neighbours,
straggled out, in the beginning of the last act, giggling and chewing
gum. Julia, raising bewildered, sweet, childish eyes to the stars above
noisy O'Farrell Street, was brought suddenly to earth by a touch on her
arm.

It was a dark, tall young man who stepped out of a shadowy doorway to
address her, a man of twenty, perhaps, with all the ripe and sensuous
beauty of the young Jew. His skin was a clear olive, his magnificent
black eyes were set off with evenly curling lashes, and his firm mouth,
under its faint moustache, made a touch of scarlet colour among the rich
brunette tones. He was dressed with a scrupulous niceness, and carried a
long light overcoat on his arm.

"Julia!" he said sombrely, coming forward, his eyes only for her.

"Why, hello, Mark!" Julia answered. And with a little concern creeping
into her manner she went on, "Why, what is it?"

Young Rosenthal glanced at her friends, and, formally offering her his
arm, said seriously: "You will walk with me?"

"We were going down to Haas's for ice-cream sodas," Julia submitted
hesitatingly.

"Well, I will take you there," Mark said. And as the others, nodding
good-naturedly at this, drifted on ahead, Julia found herself walking
down O'Farrell Street on the arm of a tall and handsome man.

It was the first time that she had done just this thing--or if not the
first time, it had never seemed to have any particular significance
before. Now, however, Julia felt in her heart a little flutter of
satisfaction. Somehow Mark did not seem just a commonplace member of the
"Rosenthal gang" to-night, nor did she seem "the Page kid." Mark was a
man, and--thrilling thought!--was angry at Julia, and Julia, hanging on
his arm, with a hundred street lights flashing on her little powdered
nose and saucy hat, was at last a "young lady!"

"What's the matter, Mark?" she asked, by way of opening the
conversation.

"Oh, nothing whatever!" Mark answered, in a rich, full voice, and with
elaborate irony. "You promised to go to the Orpheum with me, and I
waited--and I waited--and you did not come. But that is nothing, of
course!"

Julia's anger smote her dumb for a moment. Then she jerked her arm from
his, and burst out:

"I'll _tell_ you why I didn't meet you to-night, Mark Rosenthal, and if
you don't like it, you know what you can do! Last week you asked me
would I go to Morosco's with you, and I said yes, and then when it came
right down to it--your mother wasn't going, and Sophy and Hannah weren't
going, and Otto wasn't going--and I tell you right now that Mama don't
like me to go to the theatre--"

"Well, well, well!" Mark interrupted soothingly, half laughing, half
aghast at this burst of rebuke from the usually gentle Julia. "Don't be
so cross about it! So--" He put her arm in his again. "I like to have
you to myself, Julia," he said, his boyish, handsome face suddenly
flushing, his voice very low. "Do you know why?"

"No," said Julia after a pause, the word strangling her.

"You don't, eh?" Mark said, with a smiling side glance.

"Nope," said Julia, dimpling as she returned the look, and shutting her
pretty lips firmly over the little word.

"Do you know you are ador-r-rable?" Mark said, in a sort of eager rush.
"Will you go to Maskey's with me, instead of joining the others at
Haas's?" he asked, more quietly.

"Well," Julia said. She was her own mistress. Her mother had gone home
during the play with Mrs. Toomey, who complained of a headache. So,
grinning like conspirators, they stayed on the south side of the street
until it joined Market, and then went by the fountain and the big
newspaper buildings, and slipped into the confectioner's. Julia sent an
approving side glance at herself in the mirror, as she drew a satisfied
breath of the essence-laden air. She loved lights, perfumes, voices--and
all were here.

An indifferent young woman wiped their table with a damp rag, as she
took their order, both, with the daring of their years, deciding upon
the murderous combination of banana ice-cream and soda with chopped nuts
and fruit. Julia had no sooner settled back contentedly to wait for it,
than her eye encountered the beaming faces of her late companions, who,
finding Haas's crowded, had naturally drifted on to Maskey's.

Much giggling and blushing and teasing ensued. Julia was radiant as a
rose; every time she caught sight of her own pretty reflection in the
surrounding mirrors, a fresh thrill of self-confidence warmed her. She
and Mark followed the banana confection with a dish apiece of raspberry
ice-cream, and afterward walked home--it was not far--to the house in
which they both lived.

"And so we don't quarrel any more?" Mark asked, in the dim hallway
outside her door.

"Not if you won't play mean tricks on me!" Julia pouted, raising her
face so that the dim light of the gas jet that burned year in and year
out, in the blistered red-glass shade, fell upon the soft curves of her
face.

It was a deliberate piece of coquetry, and Julia, although neither he
nor any other man had ever done it before, was not at all surprised to
have Mark suddenly close his strong arms about her, and kiss her, with a
sort of repressed violence, on the mouth. She struggled from his hold,
as a matter of course, laughed a little laugh of triumph and excitement,
and shut herself into her own door.

Emeline was lying in bed, looking over some fashion and theatrical
magazines. Upon her daughter's entrance she gave a comfortable yawn.

"Did Mark find you, Julie? He was sitting on the stairs when I got home,
mad because you didn't go out with them."

"Yep, he found me!" Julia answered, still panting.

"It strikes me he's a little mushy on you, Julie," Emeline said, lazily,
turning a page. "And if you were a little older, or he had more of a
job, I'd give him a piece of my mind. You ain't going to marry _his_ sort,
I should hope. But, Lord, you're both only kids!"

"I guess I can mind my own business, Mama," Julia said.

"Well, I guess you can," Emeline conceded amiably. "Look, Ju, at the
size of these sleeves--ain't that something fierce? Get the light out as
soon as you can, lovey," she added, flinging away her magazine, and
rolling herself tight in the covers, with bright eyes fixed on the girl.

Ten minutes later Emeline was asleep. But Julia lay long awake,
springtime in her blood, her eyes smiling mysteriously into the dark.




CHAPTER III

By just what mental processes Emeline Page had come to feel herself a
dignified martyr in a world full of oppressed women, it would be
difficult to say: Emeline herself would have been the last person from
whom a reasonable explanation might have been expected. But it was a
fact that she never missed an opportunity to belittle the male sex; she
had never had much charm for men, she had none now, and consequently she
associated chiefly with women: with widows and grass widows of her own
type, and with the young actresses and would-be actresses of the curious
social level upon which she lived. Emeline's lack of charm was the most
valuable moral asset she had. Had she attracted men she would not long
have remained virtuous, for she was violently opposed to any restriction
upon her own desires, no matter how well established a restriction or
how generally accepted it might be. For a little while after George's
going, Emeline had indeed frequently used the term "if I marry again,"
but of late years she had rather softened to his memory, and enjoyed
abusing other men while she revelled in a fond recollection of George's
goodness.

"God knows I was only a foolish girl," Emeline would say, resting cold
wet feet against the open oven door while Julia pressed a frill. "But
your papa never was anything but a perfect ge'man, never! I'll never
forget one night when he took me to Grant's Cafe for dinner! I was all
dressed up to kill, and George looked elegant--"

A long reminiscence followed.

"I hope to God you get as good a man as your papa," said Emeline more
than once, romantically.

Julia, thumping an iron, would answer with cool common sense:

"Well, if I do, I want to tell you right now, Mama, I'll treat him a
good deal better than you did!"

"Oh, you'll be a wonder," Emeline would concede good-naturedly.

At very long intervals Emeline dressed herself and her daughter as
elaborately as possible, and went out into the Mission to see her
parents. With the singular readiness to change the known discomfort for
the unknown, characteristic of their class, the various young members of
the family had all gone away now, and lonely old Mrs. Cox, a shrivelled
little shell of a woman at sixty-five, always had a warm welcome for her
oldest daughter and her beautiful grandchild. She would limp about her
bare, uninviting little rooms, complaining of her husband's increasing
meanness and of her own physical ills, while with gnarled, twisted old
hands she filled a "Rebecca" teapot of cheap brown glaze, or cut into a
fresh loaf of "milk bread."

"D'ye see George at all now, Emeline?"

"Not to speak to, Mom. But"--and Emeline would lay down the little
mirror in which she was studying her face--"but the Rosenthal children
say that there's a man who's _always_ hanging about the lower doorway, and
that once he gave Hannah----"

And so on and on. Mrs. Cox was readily convinced that George, repentant,
was unable to keep away from the neighbourhood of his one and only love.
Julia, dreaming over her thick cup of strong tea, granted only a polite,
faintly weary smile to her mother's romances. She knew how glad Emeline
would be to really believe even one tenth of these flattering
suspicions.

A few weeks after Julia's long day of events with Artheris, with Carter
Hazzard, and young Rosenthal, she chanced to awaken one Saturday morning
to a pleasant, undefined sensation that life was sweet. She thought of
Mr. Hazzard, whom she had seen twice since their first meeting, but not
alone again. And she reflected with satisfaction that she knew her part
of "The Amazons" perfectly, and so was ready for the first rehearsal
to-day. This led to a little dream of the leading lady failing to appear
on the great night, and of Julia herself in Lady Noel's part; of Julia
subsequently adored and envied by the entire cast; of Carter Hazzard----

Julia had made an engagement with Mark for to-day, but the rehearsal
plan must interfere. She wondered how she could send him word, and
finally decided to see him herself for a moment early in the afternoon.
Mark, originally employed as office boy, pure and simple, had now made
himself a general handy man, reference and filing clerk, in the big
piano house of Pomeroy and Parke. He had all the good traits of his
race, and some of the traits that, without being wholly admirable, help
a man toward success. No slur at himself or his religion was keen enough
to pierce Mark's smiling armour of philosophy, no hours were too hard
for him, no work too menial for him to do cheerfully, nor too important
for him to undertake confidently. A wisdom far older than his years was
his. Poverty had been his teacher, exile and deprivation. When other
children were in school, repeating mechanically that many a little made
a mickle, that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains, and
that a man has no handicaps but those of his own making, Mark _knew_ these
things, he knew that the great forces of life were no stronger than his
own two hands, and that any work of any sort must bring him to his
goal--the goal of wealth and power and position.

He knew that his father was not so clever as he was, and why. He saw
that his mother was worn out with housework and child-bearing. He did
not idealize their home, where father, mother, and seven children were
crowded into four rooms, and where of an evening the smell of cabbage
soup and herrings, of soap-suds and hot irons on woollen, of inky school
books and perspiring humanity, mingled with the hot, oily breath of the
lamp.

Yet Mark saw beyond this, too. The food was good, if coarse, the bills
were paid, the bank account grew. Some day the girls would be married,
the boys in good positions; some day the mother should have a little
country house and a garden, and the father come home early to smoke his
pipe and prune his rose bushes. Not a very brilliant future--no. But how
brilliant to them, who could remember Russia!

As for him, Mark, there was no limit to his personal dream at all. Some
day, while yet as young as Mr. Parke, he would be as rich as Mr.
Pomeroy, he would have five splendid children, like the Pomeroy
children, he would have a wife as beautiful as young Mrs. Parke. To his
beautiful Jackson Street palace the city's best people should come, and
sometimes--for a favoured few--he would play his rippling etudes and
nocturnes, his mazurkas and polonaises.

Julia Page, an unnoticed little neighbour for many years, had, just at
present, somewhat ruffled the surface of his dream. Julia was not the
ideal wife of his mind or heart; nor was she apt to grow to fill that
ideal. Mrs. Mark Rosenthal must be a Jewess, a wise, ripened, poised,
and low-voiced woman, a lover of music, babies, gardens, cooking, and
managing.

Yet there had been a certain evening, not long before that spring
evening upon which Julia's own awakening came, when Mark had been
astonished to find a sudden charm in the little girl. She was only a
little girl, of course, he said to himself later; just a kid, but she
was a mighty cunning kid!

Julia often had dinner with the Rosenthals; she loved every separate
member of the family and she knew they all loved her. She used to run
upstairs and pop her pretty head into the Rosenthal kitchen perhaps
twice a week, sure of a welcome and a good meal. On the occasion so
significant to Mark she had been there when he got in from work, helping
his sisters Sophy and Hannah with that careless disposition of iron
knives, great china sugar bowl, oddly assorted plates, and thick cups
that was known as "setting the table."

Mark had noticed then that Julia's figure was getting very pretty, and
he watched her coming and going with a real pleasure. She sat next him
at table, and, conscious as he was of her nearness and of himself, he
found her unconsciousness very charming. Julia had burned her arm
serving the fried hominy, and she held it up for Mark to see, the bare,
sweet young arm close to his face.

And since then, poor Mark seemed to be bewitched. He could not think of
anything but Julia. It made him angry and self-contemptuous, but he was
no better off for that. He did not want to fall in love with Julia Page;
he would not admit that what he felt for Julia was love; he raged with
disappointment at the mere thought of bondage so soon, and especially
this bondage. But the sweetness of her stole upon his senses
nevertheless, tangling about him like a drifting bit of vaporous mist;
he had no sooner detached one section of it than another blew across his
eyes, set pulses to beating in his temples, and shook his whole body
with a delicious weakness.

And then came the night when she had not kept her appointment, and he
had followed her to the Alcazar Theatre, and later kissed her in the
dark hallway. Then Mark knew. From the instant her fresh lips touched
his, and he felt the soft yielding as he drew her to him, Mark knew that
he was of the world's lovers. He wanted her with all the deep passion of
first love--first love in an ardent and romantic and forceful nature.
His dreams did not change; Julia changed to fit them. She was everything
for which he had ever longed, she was perfection absolute. She became
his music, his business, his life. Every little girl, every old woman
that he passed in the street, made him think of Julia, and when he
passed a young man and woman full of concern for, and of shy pride in,
their lumpy baby in its embroidered coat, a wave of divine envy swept
Mark from head to foot.

To-day he whistled over his work, thinking of Julia. They were to meet
at three o'clock, "just to bum," as the girl said, laughing. Mark
thought that, as the season was well forward, they might take a car to
the park or the beach, but the plan had been left indefinite.

He ate his lunch, of butterless bread and sausage, and an entire
five-cent pie, in a piano wareroom, taking great bites, with dreamy
studying of the walls and long delays between. Then he wandered down
through the empty offices--it was Saturday afternoon and Pomeroy and
Parke closed promptly at twelve--had a brief chat with the Japanese
janitor, and washed his hands and combed his hair very conscientiously
in the president's own lavatory.

At half-past one he went into one of the glass showrooms, a prettily
furnished apartment whose most notable article of furniture was a grand
piano in exquisitely matched Circassian walnut. Absorbed and radiant,
Mark put back the cover, twirled the stool, and carefully opened a green
book marked "Chopin." Then he sat down, and, with the sigh of a happy
child falling upon a feast, he struck an opening chord.

The big flexible fingers still needed training, but they showed the
result of hours and hours of patient practice, too. Through his seven
years in the music house, Mark had been faithful to his gift. He made no
secret of it, his associates knew that he came back after dinner to the
very rooms that they themselves left so eagerly at the end of the day.
Mark had indeed once asked old Mr. Pomeroy to hear him play, an occasion
to which the boy still looked back with hot shame. For when his obliging
old employer had settled himself to listen after hours on an appointed
afternoon, and Mark had opened the piano, the performer suddenly found
his spine icy, his hands wet and clumsy. He felt as if he had never
touched a piano before; the attempt was a failure from the first note,
as Mark well knew. When he had finished he whisked open another book.

"That was rotten," he stammered. "I thought I could do it--I can't. But
just let me play you this--"

But the great man was in a hurry, it appeared.

"No--no, my boy, not to-day--some other time! Perhaps a little bit too
ambitious a choice, eh? We must all be ambitious, but we must know our
limitations, too. Some other time!"

Then Mr. Pomeroy was gone and Mark left to bitterest reflection.

But he recovered very sensibly from his boyish chagrin, and very
sensibly went at his practicing again. On this particular Saturday
afternoon he attacked a certain phrase in the bass, and for almost an
hour the big fingers of his left hand rippled over it steadily. Mark,
twisted about halfway on the bench, watched the performance steadily,
his right hand hanging loose.

"Damn!" he said presently, with a weary sigh, as a sharp and familiar
little pain sprang into his left wrist.

"Mark!" breathed a reproachful voice behind him. He whirled about, to
see Julia Page.

She had come noiselessly in at the glass doorway behind him, and was
standing there, laughing, a picture of fresh and demure beauty, despite
the varied colours in hat and waist and gown and gloves.

"I had to see you!" said Julia, in a rush. "And nobody answered your
telephone--there's a rehearsal of that play at the theatre to-day, so I
can't meet you--and the janitor let me in----"

Mark found her incoherence delicious; her being here, in his own
familiar stamping-ground, one of the thrilling and exciting episodes of
his life. He could have shouted--have danced for pure joy as he jumped
up to welcome her. Julia declared that she had to "fly," but Mark
insisted--and she found his insistence curiously pleasant--upon showing
her about, leading her from office to office, beaming at her whenever
their eyes met. And he _must_ play her the little Schumann, he said, but
no--for that Julia positively would _not_ wait; she jerked him by one hand
toward the door. Mark had his second kiss before they emerged laughing
and radiant into the gaiety of Kearney Street on a Saturday afternoon.

And Julia was not late for her rehearsal, or, if late, she was at least
earlier by a full quarter hour than the rest of the caste. She took an
orchestra seat in the empty auditorium at the doorkeeper's suggestion,
and yawned, and stared at the coatless back of a man who was tuning the
orchestra piano.

Presently two distinguished looking girls, beautifully dressed, came in,
and sat down near her in a rather uncertain way, and began to laugh and
talk in low tones. Neither cast a glance at Julia, who promptly decided
that they were hateful snobs, and began to regard them with burning
resentment. They had been there only a few moments when two young men
sauntered down the aisle, unmistakably gentlemen, and genuine enough to
express their enjoyment of this glimpse of a theatre between
performances. Two of them carried little paper copies of "The Amazons,"
so Julia knew them for fellow-performers.

Then a third young woman came in and walked down the aisle as the others
had done. This was an extremely pretty girl of perhaps eighteen, with
dark hair and dark bright eyes, and a very fresh bright colour. Her gown
was plain but beautifully fitting, and her wide hat was crowned with a
single long ostrich plume. She peered at the young men.

"Hello, Bobby--hello, Gray!" she said gayly, and then, catching sight of
the two other girls across the aisle, she added: "Oh, hello, Helen--how
do you do, Miss Carson? Come over here and meet Mr. Sumner and Mr.
Babcock!"

Babel ensued. Three or four waiting young people said, "Oh, Barbara!" in
tones of great delight, and the fourth no less eagerly substituted, "Oh,
Miss Toland!"

"How long have you poor, long-suffering catfish been waiting here?"
demanded Miss Barbara Toland, with a sort of easy sweetness that Julia
found instantly enviable. "Why, we're all out in the foyer--Mother's
here, chaperoning away like mad, and nearly all the others! And"--she
whisked a little gold watch into sight--"my dears, it's twenty minutes
to four!"

Every one exclaimed, as they rushed out. Julia, unaccountably nervous,
wished she were well out of this affair, and wondered what she ought to
do.

Presently some twenty-five or thirty well-dressed folk came streaming
back down the main aisle in a wild confusion of laughter and talk.
Somehow the principals were filtered out of this crowd, and somehow they
got on the stage, and got a few lights turned on, and assembled for the
advice of an agitated manager. Dowagers and sympathetic friends settled
in orchestra seats to watch; the rehearsal began.

Julia had strolled up to the stage after the others; now she sat on a
shabby wooden chair that had lost its back, leaned her back against a
piece of scenery, and surveyed the scene with as haughty and indifferent
an air as she could assume.

"And the Sergeant--who takes that?" demanded the manager, a young fellow
of their own class, familiarly addressed as "Matty."

The caste, which had been churning senselessly about him, chorussed an
explanation.

"A professional takes that, Mat, don't you remember?"

"Well, where is she?" Matty asked irritably.

Julia here sauntered superbly forward, serenely conscious of youth,
beauty, and charm. Every one stared frankly at her, as she said
languidly:

"Perhaps it's I you're looking for? Mr. Artheris--"

"Yes, that's right!" said Matty, relieved. He wiped his forehead.
"Miss--Page, isn't it?" He paused, a little at a loss, eying the other
ladies of the caste dubiously. The girl called Barbara Toland now came
forward with her ready graciousness, and the two girls looked fairly
into each other's eyes.

"Miss Page," said Barbara, and then impatiently to the manager, "Do go
ahead and get started, Matty; we've got to get home some time to-night!"

Julia's introduction was