Emeline usually rolled over to smile at her daughter when she heard the door open, and Julia would be sent to the delicatessen store for the component parts of a substantial meal.  Julia loved the cramped, clean, odorous shop that smelled of wet wood and mixed mustard pickles and smoked fish.  A little cream bottle would be filled from an immense can at her request, the shopkeeper’s wife wiping it with a damp rag and a bony hand.  And the pat of butter, and the rolls, and the sliced ham, and the cheese—­Herr Bauer scratched their prices with a stubby pencil on an oily bit of paper, checked their number by the number of bundles, gave Julia the buttery change, and Julia hurried home for a delicious loitering breakfast with her mother.  Emeline, still in her limp, lace-trimmed nightgown, with a spotted kimono hanging loosely over it, and her hair a wildly tousled mass at the top of her head, presided at a clear end of the kitchen table.  She and Julia occupied only two rooms of the original apartment now; a young lawyer, with his wife and child, had the big front room, and the dining-room was occupied by two mysterious young men who came and went for years without ever betraying anything of their own lives to their neighbours.  Julia only knew that they were young, quiet, hard working, and of irreproachable habits.

But she knew the people in the front room quite well.  Mrs. Raymond Toomey was a neat, bright, hopeful little woman, passionately devoted to her husband and her spoiled, high-voiced little son.  Raymond Toomey was a big, blustering fool of a man, handsome in a coarse sort of way, noisy, shallow, and opinionated.  Whenever there were races, the Toomeys went to the races, taking the precocious “Lloydy,” in his velvet Fauntleroy suit and tasselled shoes, and taking “Baby,” a shivering little terrier with wet, terrified eyes.  Sometimes Mrs. Toomey came out to the kitchen in the morning, to curl her ostrich feathers over the gas stove, or join Mrs. Page in a cup of coffee.

“God, girlie, that goes to the spot,” she would yawn, stirring her cup, both elbows on the table.  “We had a fierce day yesterday, and Ray took a little too much last night—­you know how men are!  He had a stable tip yesterday, and went the limit—­like a fool!  I play hunches—­there’s no such thing as a tip!”

And sometimes she would put a little printed list of entries before Julia and say: 

“Pick me a winner, darling.  Go on—­just pick any one!”

Julia soon reached the age when she could get her own breakfast, and then, mingled with a growing appreciation of the girl’s beauty, her mother felt that gratitude always paid by an indolent person to one of energy.  She knew that her child was finer than she was, prettier, more clever, more refined.  She herself had never had any reserves; she had always screamed or shouted or cried or run away when things crossed her, but she saw Julia daily displaying self-control and composure such as she had never known.  There were subtleties in Julia:  her sweet firm young mouth closed over the swift-coming words she would not say, her round, round blue eyes were wiser already than her mother’s eyes.