he 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