One sees her conscientiously hopping over the mud puddles on the way to school to avoid soiling her shoes and stockings, because that would worry her mother; yet one may also see that a paper doll, whose pink cheeks and blue eyes fill her with a maternal delight, is snuggled under her shawl. Alas! at this point, following her thread of life, one sees very distinctly the look in her eyes the day that Edward Black snatched that paper doll away from her, and there before the whole school at playtime wrenched its head off, and flung its decapitated body into a snow-bank. That was a gray winter day with dirty yellowed snow upon the ground and fresh flakes drifting down from a heavily close and sullen sky. Julie is paralyzed when that big bully snatches her doll, powerless to move or cry out; she can only stand and look, her eyes wide and stricken, her hands clutched together. Not so Henr’etta Wilkins, Julie’s deskmate. She flew at Edward Black, and slapped him full and stingingly upon the face with her competent hand. It was Henr’etta’s dramatic act which precipitated a general scuffle and free fight among the children. They fought back and forth through the snow and over the tattered remnants of the paper doll. Julie took no part in the conflict, but under its cover her tension of horror relaxed sufficiently for her to creep over and collect the torn bits that had been her doll. The other children knocked her about as she did so, and when she picked up the last bit, one of the big boys stepped square upon her hand. But Julie hardly noticed that. In a daze, she turned out of the school-yard and made for home, slipping and stumbling through the snow, the fragments of the doll pressed tight against her breast, and the forbidding sky hanging low upon her.
At home she could only hold out the torn pieces dumbly to her mother.
“What’s the matter, honey?” her mother cried, nervously. “Oh, what did they do to its doll baby?”
Then at last Julie could speak. “Edward Black did it!” she gasped. “He—he tore her head right off and flung it in the snow. I couldn’t stop him—I couldn’t do anything. I—couldn’t—” her voice squeaked out impotently in a flood of tears.
“Never mind! never mind! It shall have another doll baby,” her mother comforted her.
But a question struggled convulsively to the surface through Julie’s sobs. “What—what made Ed act so mean? I wasn’t doing a thing. I was—I was just standing there.”
“I don’t know,” her mother shook her head with a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. Folks do that way—I reckon it’s all you can expect in this world.”
“All you can expect in this world,” Julie repeated with a broken gasp.
Afterward her mother bathed her face and hands, tied up her bruised fingers, and giving her a cookie fresh and warm from the oven, made her go back to school, for “What’ll folks think if you stay home?” she said. “All the children will laugh at you.”
So Julie went back, the cookie, fragrant and comforting, in her hand, but a poignant disillusioned throb still in her heart, driven in so deep that it was beyond the relief of tears; and the two phrases her mother had used, “That’s all you can expect in this world,” and “What’ll folks think?” turned themselves over and over, burrowing down into her mind and intrenching themselves there. She took a little tentative nibble of the cookie to comfort herself. It was good, very good.