The Story of Julia Page | Page 2

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