Julie said nothing, but went steadily on with her sewing, her needle weaving deftly in and out of the soft blue material she was at work on; but Elizabeth was too completely wrapped up in her own atmosphere to be aware of the other’s unresponsiveness.
“I always did know about hats,” she went on. “It seems like it’s a kind of a gift with me. I can always tell what kind of a hat a person ought to wear. Now you—you ought to wear something kind of startling to bring you into view. If you don’t have it, you’re the kind of mousey little woman that slips by without any one’s payin’ any attention. I looked at you on Sunday, and I says, ‘That little woman kind of needs something to bring her out. Now what is it?’ I says, sort of turning you over in my mind, like you taste cake-batter to see what it needs. And all at once it came to me: ‘It’s a hat,’ I says, ‘a cerise turban: that would do the trick.’ If folks didn’t notice a thing else about you, they’d see that turban. You ain’t got just the color I had in mind,” she went on, surveying the hat counter, “but,” taking up a green turban, “this is kind of the shape I mean. Now if you had a piece of cerise silk you could fix this right over for yourself. Lemme see how it looks on you.”
But Julie shrunk hastily away. “No, no thank you,” she said with that quick breathlessness that was a nervous trick with her. “No, I never wear cerise, and I don’t care for that shape on myself.”
“Oh, all right then,” Elizabeth retorted, laying down the hat in a pique. “You can suit yourself. I was just trying to show you how you could attract a little attention. But you’re just like my husband; he sort of wants to slink through the world without anybody noticing him. I tell him a person would think he was a submarine, he’s so anxious to have that ‘low visibility’ the papers are always talking about these days. I declare, I’d like to put a cerise turban on him—a red hat like what the Popes wear in the Catholic Church. Maybe he couldn’t get by without folks seein’ that! ‘Look a’ here, Tim,’ I’m always sayin’ to him, ‘What’s the matter with you? It ain’t going to kill you if folks sees you. Come out into the open,’ I says. ‘You can’t hide behind my skirts all the time.’ But the more I talk at him, the more he goes in the ground an’ pulls the hole in after him. I declare, I think it’ll be a right good thing if the draft does take him.”
“The draft?” Julie looked up quickly.
“Mm—h’m,” Elizabeth nodded. “He’s liable to be called any time now. He just took this little job here while he was waiting. That’s why I didn’t bring any of my furniture with me. I got a nice house and a lot of elegant furniture in Lynchburg where we was, an’ we’ll go back there after the war. The paper he worked on there’s just suspended for a while. The editor an’ owner’s both gone to the front. Well, you don’t catch me stayin’ on here if Tim’s drafted. I’ll go on back to my own home. I got plenty of friends there. But say—he’ll make a great soldier, won’t he? I always tell him Tim’s short for timid with him. You can laugh if you want. I know just how funny he always strikes folks.”
“I—I don’t want to laugh,” Julie protested. “I—oh, I think the war’s awful!” she burst out. “I don’t want to laugh over any one’s going.”
“Oh, well,” Elizabeth said carelessly. “I wouldn’t be s’prised if the war didn’t make a man out of him—the drill an’ all would be fine. But I tell him he’d better mind out, or he’ll be the goat of the whole camp.”
Finding no chair to sit in, Elizabeth had been drifting about the shop, inspecting one showcase after another; now she came to rest at the counter behind which Julie was seated, and leaning nonchalantly against it, she did what was to Julie an amazing thing. She opened a gilt vanity-bag which she had been swinging, and taking from it a cigarette case, selected one and proceeded to light it with a knowing air. Julie knew, of course, that women did smoke cigarettes somewhere, but she had never seen them do it, much less light one in her discreet little shop. She was used to seeing the mountain women out in the country smoke pipes; indeed, her own grandmother on her father’s side had smoked and chewed as well. “But that’s different,” she told herself now. Her grandmother’s corncob pipe before a stone hearth seemed wholly in keeping with the old woman’s kerchief-covered head, her spinning wheel, her loom, and patchwork quilts. Not so Elizabeth’s insolent cigarette. That appeared to Julie an affront to her mother’s spirit, which always seemed to her still hovering dimly in the background of the little shop. She and her mother, living their gentle reserved lives there together, had made up the atmosphere, the soul, of the little establishment, pouring into it all the timid modesty, gentle propriety, and sincerity of their own hearts. They had neither of them had a brave or robust attitude toward life, but they had nevertheless woven a pattern that was adorned with a thousand tendernesses toward one another, with exquisite bits of understanding consideration, with gentle courtesies and kindnesses toward their neighbors, and with a careful honesty in all their dealings. Timid as they were, they yet had wrought an unseen mesh of life that had a delicate beauty all its own. And now to Julie, all that past that her mother and she had woven together was outraged by Elizabeth’s cigarette.
“I’ve got to stop her! She shan’t smoke here in my shop. What would mother say?” she thought breathlessly to herself, trying to control the tremor that ran through her hands, so that she might set even stitches in her work. “I’ve got to stop her! It’s my shop. She’s got no business to smoke here. Why, I wouldn’t let my best friend smoke here!” But though she protested these things to herself, Julie could not whip her courage up to bringing them forth in spoken words, and Elizabeth continued to puff out long blue columns of smoke, watching them with satisfaction, while with an affected gesture, she flecked her ashes here and there over the clean floor. She was in truth a little disappointed that her cigarette had provoked no comment. She had expected Julie at least to look startled, and was prepared to defend herself with condescending patronage. Julie’s silence was disconcerting, for Elizabeth possessed none of the spiritual antennæ with which to sense another’s atmosphere if unexpressed by word or gesture. She strolled back to the mirror, and under cover of patting her hair into place peeped at Julie’s reflection to see if she was being watched from behind her back. But Julie, whose weakness it was to have antennæ far too sensitive to another’s atmosphere, knew what Elizabeth expected, and kept her eyes resolutely upon the threading of her needle. It was a little defiant clash between the two women, of which Julie was fully aware, but which Elizabeth realized only from her own standpoint.