It had begun ten years ago in the Life Class at the Girls’ Institute of
Practical Art where Miss Julie, bravely disregarding her thirty-five
years, had commenced to study. Upon the death of their very old father,
the three Humberts, brother and two sisters, had left their farm in
Maine and had come to New York to live. They were independent now, and
in a hurry to leave their old homestead, to be free from that
atmosphere, where they had passed a dreary childhood and a youth
frightfully oppressed by the old man. Crude, strong people, they were
possessed of a strange and pitiful craving for “culture.” Perhaps
because they were rather too old and too repressed for pleasure.
Mr. Humbert had found a position in an office, fulfilling a lifelong
dream of gentility, and his great hands, worn and roughened with the
hard labour of the farm, seized eagerly upon the pen. He had made
himself into the likeness of a scholar, without learning, without
aptitude; he had covered himself with the shell of a scholar, and he
deceived himself and his sisters and all the rest of their little world.
Miss Amy had found it hardest to adapt herself. She was by nature the
perfect village gossip, the meddlesome and vindictive spinster inflicted
upon every community in all corners of this earth. She was cruel,
jealous and stupid. Left to herself she had been unable to discover in
all the city anything which really interested her. But a casual
neighbour had taken her in hand, and under her direction she developed
strangely. She became absorbed in Interior Decorating. She had not a
vestige of taste; she never dreamt of applying at home any of the
principles of which she read, but she dearly loved to see pictures and
to read about fine old furniture, about rugs, about Antiques. She used
to go to Auction Sales with great pleasure. Also, with mysterious
facility, she made a number of friends. In the stores, the markets, in
the street cars, she would drop into conversation with strangers, and
she would never let them go. She managed so that within a year’s time
she was able to go out _somewhere_ nearly every day.
Miss Julie, as we said, began at once to study art, with rapture. No one
could imagine how she enjoyed that Life Class--a most refined and
earnest class, thoroughly feminine, and inclined to fussiness. There
were only twelve members and five of them had scholarships of which they
were doggedly determined to take advantage. They came early, so as not
to waste a minute, and they carried out every minute suggestion of the
teacher. The models were all investigated, and a good reputation was of
more avail than a fine body. Respectable women, generally a trifle
heavy, “picturesque” old men with white beards, a young man or so who
was invariably struggling to study something, and was not to be
discouraged by posing all day and amusing himself all evening.
The class was on this particular morning assembled, all ready, sitting
before their drawing boards, and a little indignant at the delay. They
couldn’t bear to waste time.
“Ten minutes late!” said one of them. “It’s to be a child to-day, isn’t
it, Miss Humbert?”
Miss Julie, as monitor, was informed and answered yes.
“I don’t care about doing children,” said the student, “I don’t think
they’re interesting. That last little boy was perfectly square.”
Just then in came a fat, smiling woman in black, holding a little girl
by the hand. Miss Julie pointed out the dressing screen, and they
disappeared behind it. For an unreasonably long time their voices were
heard, whispering.
It was Miss Julie who voiced the indignation of the serious class.
“Aren’t you ready to pose yet?” she called out. “We’ve wasted over
twenty minutes.”
“Just a moment, please ma’am!” answered the woman’s pleasant voice, and
presently she emerged, still leading the child by the hand. Reluctantly
the little thing came out from behind the screen, a thin, white body;
then suddenly she broke violently away from her mother and disappeared
again.
“Saints deliver us!” said the woman with a sigh. “Did you ever see the
like?”
And she went after the child, and evidently tried to drag it out, for it
began to cry, in a low, hoarse little voice.
“No! No! I can’t! No, Mommer! I can’t!”
“Naughty little thing!” said one of the serious students, with a frown.
But Miss Julie had got up and gone behind the screen.
“What’s the matter?” she demanded, with severity.
“That child!” said the mother. “She’s that obstinate there is no
reasoning with her at all. She’s made up her mind she will not stand out
there for the young ladies to draw.”
“Why?” demanded Miss Julie.
“Some silly notion,” said the mother.
Miss Julie looked down at the little girl; she had pulled her dress
round her shivering little body and was crouched against the wall, with
eyes to break your heart, full of terror and anguish. Miss Julie was
shocked.
“What’s the matter, pet?” she asked, gently. “Aren’t you well?”
The child couldn’t answer, only shook her head, while tears began to
roll slowly down her cheeks. Miss Julie went down on her knees beside
her, and tried to put an arm about her, but she cowered away.
“Tell me!” she entreated. “Why don’t you want to pose, my dear?”
With lips trembling so that she could scarcely speak, the child told
her.
“I want ... to--get dressed.... I don’t ... want them to see me.”
“Hasn’t she posed before?” Miss Julie asked the mother.
“No, she has not. I’ve done the best I----”
“Do you mean to say you’re trying to force her--when she feels as she
does--when she’s _ashamed_?”
The stout woman did not flinch at all before Miss Julie’s stern glance.
“It will do her no harm,” she said. “Only for these young ladies and
while she’s so young.”
“It’s very wrong!” cried Miss Julie. “It’s--it shouldn’t be allowed.”
“She’s engaged already. For two hours at fifty cents an hour. She needs
the money and she will have to do the work for it,” the mother remarked
grimly. “Go on with you, Rosaleen!”
“Get dressed!” said Miss Julie to the child. “You can pose in a costume.
I’ll find something.”
She explained as well as she could to her classmates, but received no
general sympathy. Most of them thought the child was awfully silly.
“And she’s made us waste half our time,” said one of them. “I’m going to
complain in the office.”
Miss Julie devised a costume which she said was a gipsy dress. She went
behind the screen again and found the little girl in underwaist and
petticoat, buttoning up her poor, scuffed little boots.
“We’ll take those off,” she said. “You won’t mind being bare-legged.”
She dressed the little thing while it stood there like a doll. A
beautiful child, too thin and altogether too small for its years, but
very charmingly and gracefully built; it had deep-set clear grey eyes
and a wistful small face, broad at the brow and tapering to a pointed
chin, like a kitten’s. And it had about it something which enslaved Miss
Julie, some mystic and adorable quality which she could not name, and
which no one else saw.
She unfastened the two scrawny little “pig tails” and let her ill-kept
brown hair fall about the neck, pitifully thin, like a bird’s; then she
tied a broad scarlet ribbon about her forehead and put on a short
spangled jacket over the underwaist. She looked very unlike a gipsy,
with her meek glance and her fair skin, but she was undeniably lovely,
and the class set to work drawing her without further grumbling. She was
quiet as a lamb, quick to obey any suggestion, evidently anxious to
atone for her naughtiness. She looked pitifully tired, too.
Miss Julie was quite determined not to let this child vanish. She
resolutely stopped the stout woman as she was leaving.
“You won’t make her pose any more, will you?” she said, entreating.
“I’m a poor woman,” said the mother, “and I have to do the best I can.”
“But it’s----”
“It’s fifty cents an hour, Miss, that’s what it is. And I need the money
that bad.”
“I’ll find something better for her to do,” said Miss Julie, rashly. “If
you’ll give me your name and address, I’ll find something _much_ better.
Only--she mustn’t do this. It’s not right, feeling as she does.”
“Only Saturdays and after school,” said the mother. “I do the best I can
for her, but ’tis not very much, where there are six and me a widow. She
goes regular to the Sisters’ school, and she is doing fine there. She’s
not twelve yet and----”
“She’s very small for that age,” said Miss Julie.
“She is small,” her mother agreed, “and childish-like for her age. But
she’s smart. Last Christmas didn’t they give her a prize--a book with
poetry in it--for elocution.”
Miss Julie had wished to regard this mother as a brute, a fiend; she had
not enough experience or subtlety to comprehend lights and shades.
Everyone must be good or bad, and no shilly-shallying. So she regarded
this note of pride in the woman’s voice as hypocrisy.
She watched them as they went out, the rusty widow with her profoundly
cynical red face, the fragile, shabby child clinging to her, stealing
sidelong glances at the “young ladies,” who were getting ready to go
home. She was determined to save that lovely and abused child.
She had hurried home to “consult” her brother. Not that she had any real
regard for his opinion or any desire to know what it was; she knew, in
fact, that he probably would advise her to use her own judgment. But she
considered it decent to consult the man in the house; so she approached
him with her idea.
“A lovely little thing,” she said. “Really beautiful--and so intelligent
looking.”
“Yes?” said Mr. Humbert.
“And something really refined about her.... Really, Morton, I should
like to adopt her.”
That roused him. A child in the place! Impossible! He tried to argue,
but he couldn’t. He was never able to. He had some queer constitutional
inability for argument; a fatal lassitude would overwhelm him before he
had begun even to express his views. He always ran away, shut himself
into his own room and forced himself to forget whatever it was that he
had found unpleasant.
“I’d have to see the woman, of course,--investigate...” he said, hoping
in this way to push the whole topic away into the distance.
But his sister agreed with alarming promptness.
“Of course!” she said.
Well, then, two days later, when he came home from his office, and as
usual put his head in at the kitchen door to announce himself and to see
what was going forward, he saw sitting in two chairs side by side a
voluminous widow and a thin little girl, drinking cocoa with relish and
with elegance, little fingers crooked in the air.
“This is Mrs. Monahan!” said Julie, briefly.
He saw that he was expected to go in and question this stout woman with
an amused red face, and he would have preferred death.
“I’ll leave the matter in your hands, Julie,” he said, and hastened into
his own room, positively trembling with fright.
It wasn’t long before Julie knocked at his door.
“We’ve come to a temporary arrangement,” she said. “I actually believe
that woman’s glad to be rid of her child.”
Forgetting that the forlorn little child was still sitting in the
kitchen, and able to hear every word.