Julia learned that her own father and mother were in Los Angeles, where George was looking for employment.  Evelyn had developed a sudden ambition to be a dressmaker, Marguerite had a new admirer.  Pa, Mrs. Cox said, was awful cross and cranky.  Julia, with a premonition of trouble, asked for Chester.

“He’s fine; he’s the only one Pa’ll speak to,” her grandmother said, unexpectedly.

“Oh,” said Julia eagerly, “he’s here?”

“Sure, he come back,” Mrs. Cox assured her indifferently.  “He’s got good work.”

Walking home in the early darkness, Julia could have danced for very lightness of heart.  She had dreaded the call, dreaded their jealousy of her new chance, dreaded the possibility of their wishing to share the joys of The Alexander with her.  She found them entirely uninterested in her problems, and entirely absorbed in themselves.  Marguerite remarked that she did not see why Julia “let them make” her wear the plain linen uniform of which Julia was secretly so proud.  Evelyn was fretting because dressmakers’ apprentices could depend upon such very poor pay, and vouchsafed Julia a moment’s attention only when Julia observed that the Tolands patronized a very fashionable dressmaker, and might say a good word to her for Evelyn.  This excited Evelyn very much, and she suggested that perhaps she herself had better see Miss Toland.

“No—­no!  I’ll do it,” Julia said hastily.

Mrs. Cox, upon her departure, extended her granddaughter a warm invitation.

“If they don’t treat you good, dearie, you come right back here and Grandma’ll take good care of you,” said she, and Evelyn and Marguerite, eying Julia over their cups of tea, nodded half pityingly.  They thought it a very poor job that did not permit one to come home to this kitchen at night, even less desirable than their own despised employments.  Julia’s being kept at night only added one more item to the long total that made the helplessness of the poor.  It was as if Julia, dancing back to The Alexander in the early darkness, hugged to her heart the assurance that these kinswomen were as contentedly independent of her as she of them.

These experiences belonged to early days at The Alexander.  There were other experiences, hours of cold discouragement and doubt, hours of bitter self-distrust.  Julia trembled over mistakes, and made a hundred mistakes of which she never knew.  But by some miracle, she never chanced to offend her erratic superior.  To Miss Toland there was small significance in the fact of an ill-cut pattern or a lost key.  At the mothers’ meetings, when Julia was dismally smitten with a sense of her own uselessness, Miss Toland thought her shy little attempts at friendliness very charming, and when she casually corrected the faults of Julia’s speech, she gave no further thought to the matter, although Julia turned hot and cold at the recollection for many a day to come.