The Story of Julia Page | Page 5

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