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TITLE: THE STORY OF JULIA PAGE
AUTHOR: KATHLEEN NORRIS
EBOOK: E04517 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

VOLUME V

THE STORY OF JULIA PAGE

KATHLEEN NORRIS

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

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