oom, winter days, was always bright and warm and
snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not
unpleasant smell of dyes, and stuffs, and velvet, and glue, and steam,
and flatiron, and a certain heady scent that Julia Gold, the head
trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark gray
patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him
for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have
around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush reason, the girls
would not go home to dinner or supper, but would bring their lunches and
cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold,
especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from
Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the
best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or
Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original
design, or she would never have been content to be head milliner in a
small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory
down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her
invaluable.

The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very
black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick, dark
line. Her face, as she bent over her work, was sullen and brooding, but
when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by
a vivid flash of teeth, and eyes, and smile. Her voice was deep and low.
She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking
something. Around the work table, mornings she used to relate the dream
she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being
pursued by a lover. "And then I woke up, screaming." Neither she nor the
sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers.
But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.

"You're alone too much, evenings. That's what comes of living in a
boarding house. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you
good, and it'll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me
company."

Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the
house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy kimonos with big
flowers embroidered on them. They made her hair look blacker and her
skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in
and the four would play