



Produced by Charles Franks, David Garcia and the PG Online Distributed
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[Illustration: "It has never occurred to one of you to ask _why_ I am
different from other women--to ask just what made me so!"]






THE STORY OF JULIA PAGE

BY KATHLEEN NORRIS

_Frontispiece by C. Allan Gilbert_

1915



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