m to the long total
that made the helplessness of the poor. It was as if Julia, dancing back
to The Alexander in the early darkness, hugged to her heart the
assurance that these kinswomen were as contentedly independent of her as
she of them.

These experiences belonged to early days at The Alexander. There were
other experiences, hours of cold discouragement and doubt, hours of
bitter self-distrust. Julia trembled over mistakes, and made a hundred
mistakes of which she never knew. But by some miracle, she never chanced
to offend her erratic superior. To Miss Toland there was small
significance in the fact of an ill-cut pattern or a lost key. At the
mothers' meetings, when Julia was dismally smitten with a sense of her
own uselessness, Miss Toland thought her shy little attempts at
friendliness very charming, and when she casually corrected the faults
of Julia's speech, she gave no further thought to the matter, although
Julia turned hot and cold at the recollection for many a day to come.

Julia never made any objection, never hinted by so much as a reproachful
eyelid, that Miss Toland's way of doing things was not that usually
adopted. Julia would show her delight when a shopping tour and a lunch
downtown were substituted for a sewing lesson; she docilely pushed back
her boiling potatoes and beef stew when Miss Toland was for delaying
supper while they went out to buy a waffle iron, and made some
experiments with batter. On three or four mornings each week there were
no classes, and on these mornings the two loitered along over their
coffee and toast, Miss Toland talking, Julia a passionately interested
listener. Perhaps the older woman would read some passage from Meredith
or de Balzac, after which Julia dipped into Meredith for herself, but
found him slow, and plunged back into Dickens and Thackeray. It amused
Miss Toland to watch her read, to have Julia burst out, with flaming
cheeks:

"Oh, I _hope_ Charles Darney won't be such a fool as to go to Paris
_now_--oh, _does_ he?" or:

"You wouldn't catch _me_ marrying George Osborne--a spoiled, selfish pig,
that's what _he_ is!"

So the months went by, and the day came when Julia, standing shyly
beside Miss Toland, said smilingly:

"Do you know what day _this_ is, Miss Toland?"

"To-day?" Miss Toland said briskly. "No, I don't. Why?"

"I've been here a year to-day," Julia said, dimpling.

"You _have_?" Miss Toland, handling bolts of pink-and-white gingham at