uying trips. Julia had not much genius for original design, or she
never would 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 worktable, 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
boardinghouse. 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 negligees with big
flower patterns strewn over 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 bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and
canny game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous
hand, always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as
a partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.

It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly
into the living room from the kitchen, where she and Adele were
foraging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene,
arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she
came in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia
Gold was thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite
twenty-one.

"How long?" said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a
leaf of lettuce in her hand then, and still she did not look comic.

"I'm crazy about her," said Eugene. "We're crazy about each other.
We'