And clothes!  These clothes would not do!  She had no money; she must borrow.  And how was she to help in sewing classes and cooking classes, knowing only what she knew?

“.... said to her as nicely as I could, but firmly,” Miss Toland was saying, above the rasp of a running faucet in the bathroom, ’"Well, my dear Miss Hewitt, you may be a trained worker and I’m not, but you can’t expect your theories to work under conditions—­ ’”

“What a bluffer I am,” thought Julia, getting into bed.  She snapped her light off, but Miss Toland turned it on again when she came to the door to look at Julia with great satisfaction.

“Comfortable, my dear?”

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

“Have you forgotten to open your window?”

Julia raised herself on an elbow.

“Well, I believe I have,” said she.

Miss Toland flung it up.

“We’re as safe as a church here,” she said, after a moment’s study of the street.  “Sometimes the Italians opposite get noisy, but they’re harmless.  Well, I’m going to read—­you’ll see my light.  Sleep tight!”

“Thank you,” said Julia.

Miss Toland went back to her room, and Julia, wide awake, lay staring at her own room’s pure bare walls, the triangle of light that fell in the little passageway from Miss Toland’s reading lamp, and the lights in the street outside.  Now and then a passing car sent lights wheeling across her ceiling like the flanges of a fan; now and then a couple of men passing just under her window roused her with their deep voices, or a tired child’s voice rose up above the patter of footsteps like a bird’s pipe in the night.  Cats squalled and snarled, and fled up the street; a soprano voice floated out on the night air: 

“But the waves still are singing to the shore As they sang in the happy days of yore—­”

To these and a thousand less sharply defined noises, to the constant, steady flicking of stiff pages in Miss Toland’s room, Julia fell asleep.

Miss Toland told her family of the arrangement some three months later.  She met her sister-in-law and oldest niece downtown for luncheon one day in November, and when the ladies had ordered their luncheon and piled superfluous wraps and parcels upon a fourth chair, Barbara, staring about the Palm Room, and resting her chin on one slender wrist, asked indifferently: 

“And how’s The Alexander, Aunt Sanna?”

“Why don’t you come and see?” asked her aunt briskly.  “You’ve all deserted me, and I don’t know whether I’m on speaking terms with you or not!  We’re getting on splendidly.  Nineteen girls in our Tuesday evening club; mothers’ meetings a great success.  I’ve captured a rare little personality in Julia.”

She enlarged upon the theme:  Julia’s industry, her simplicity, her natural sympathy with and comprehension of the class from which the frequenters of The Alexander were drawn.  Mrs. Toland listened smilingly, her bright eyes roving the room constantly.  Barbara did not listen at all; she studied the scene about her sombrely, with heavy-lidded eyes.