Julia was really happiest in her relationship with the children.  She frequently peeped into the kindergarten during the morning, and had her dearly loved favourites among the tiny girls and boys, and she could never be absent from the sewing class every afternoon when some forty small girls scattered themselves about the assembly hall, and chattered and sang as they worked.  Volunteers from among the city’s best families were usually on hand to inspect the actual sewing—­vague, daintily dressed girls who alternately spoiled and neglected their classes, who came late and left early—­but Julia kept order, supplied materials, recited the closing prayer, and played the marches by which the children marched out at five o’clock.  Now and then she incited some small girl to sing or recite for the others, and two or three times a year the sewing classes gave an evening entertainment—­ extraordinary affairs at the memory of which Julia and Miss Toland used to laugh for weeks.  To drill the little, indifferent, stupid youngsters in songs and dances, to spangle fifty costumes of paper cambric and tissue, to shout emphatic directions about the excited murmurings of the churning performers, to chalk marks on the stage, and mark piano scores, were all duties that fell to the two resident workers.  Julia sacrificed her immaculate bedroom for a green room, the perspiration would stream from her face as she whipped off one dirty little frock after another, fastened the fairy regalia over unspeakable undergarments, and loosened sticky braids of black or yellow hair into something approaching a fairylike fluffiness.  One second to straighten her own tumbled hair at a mirror, another to warn her carefully ranged performers in the passage, and Julia was off to light the hall and open the street door to the clamorous audience.  Opening the performance with a crash of chords from the piano, fifteen minutes later, she would turn her face to the stage, that the singers might see her lips framing the words they were so apt to forget, and manage to keep a watchful eye upon the noisy group of boys that filled the back benches and the gaslights that might catch a fairy’s spear or a witch’s wand.

“Well, we’ve had some awful performances in the place, but really I think to-night’s was about the worst!” Miss Toland might remark, when the last dirty little garment had been claimed by its owner, and the last fairy had reluctantly gone away.

“Well, the mothers and fathers thought it was fine,” Julia would submit, with a weary grin.

“When that awful Cunningham child, with her awful, flat, slapping feet, began to dance the Highland Fling, I truly thought I would strangle, trying not to laugh!” Miss Toland, gazing absently over her book, would add reflectively.

“And the Queen of the Elves in those dirty pink stockings!  And poor Hazel, bursting into tears as usual!” Julia, collapsed in a chair, dishevelled and rosy, would give a long sigh of relaxation and relief.