The color rushed into Julie’s face.
“Say,” he pursued, watching her from under the drooped lids of his pig eyes, “What was you doin’ sittin’ out on the church steps last night, when everybody else was inside?”
So Edward Black, of all people, had seen her!
“Nothing—it wasn’t anything,” she stumbled, knowing that her voice sounded frightened, and that her cheeks were blazing.
“Oh, yes, it was nothin’! Nothin’ be dogged! Folks don’t turn red like that over nothin’. Well, I’m goin’ to tell people how Julie Rose goes to prayer-meeting!”
But here Number Twelve whistled down the line—a clear burst of sound, cutting joyously through the air. Edward Black had to supply Julie with her ticket, and so she was delivered.
It was on her way back from Red River that Julie first saw Timothy Bixby.
The shopping trips to Red River were always occasions of discomfort to Julie. It was unnerving to her to be shaken out of her accustomed rut of Hart’s Run. Out in the unfamiliar streets of the larger town, she always felt strange and dreadfully conspicuous. Henr’etta Crossman, who had been Henr’etta Wilkinson, Julie’s schoolmate in Hart’s Run, and with whom Julie generally took dinner when she came to Red River, was apt to call jovial attention to Julie’s unhappy self-consciousness. “Come right in to its momma,” she would greet Julie, enfolding her against her large bosom. “Nothing didn’t bite you comin’ up street, did it!”
A day in Red River spent in Henr’etta’s society left Julie limp, crushed by the other’s exuberant self-confidence, with all the delicate antennæ of her personality brushed aside, as a butterfly’s wing is brushed by a too rough touch.
The day in question was no exception. Indeed, after her wretched night, Julie was more than ever drained of all vitality when she boarded the afternoon train for Hart’s Run, squeezing herself and her bundles down into a seat beside a fat woman with a bulging suit-case. “Henr’etta certainly is kind,” she told herself wearily, “but someway, being with her always makes me feel mighty small, she’s so big and sure of herself. And Red River, too, it always makes me feel like I was out naked in the world. Why,” she thought suddenly, “that’s just what Mrs. Anderson said. She said I was pretty nigh as naked as that little bird, and it’s just the truth!”