The Bixbys settled themselves down in Mrs. Johnson’s rooms over Julie Rose’s little shop, and thereafter the lives of these two new people were constantly crossing the thread of Julie’s life, all of them together weaving that unseen pattern in the garment of existence.
Elizabeth Bixby and her landlady fell into an indifferent intimacy. Aunt Sadie was a sociable person well up in her sixties. The immediate pressure of life was over for her, except when some one of her children, all of whom were married, needed her in an emergency. The years had drifted her into a rather pleasant backwater where she had leisure to look about her and to enjoy what small diversions Hart’s Run had to offer. Her gray eyes, set in a broad, weather-beaten face, were shrewd but tolerant. She viewed human nature clearly, but not unkindly.
“You got to take people like you find ’em,” she was apt to state. Of Elizabeth Bixby she said, “Oh, well, the poor thing, maybe I’d’ve put a little more sweetening in, if I’d had the makin’ of her; but I didn’t mix her batter, so it’s no concern of mine. I’m kind of sorry for her, she craves so to have people notice her, an’ wants her own way so bad; but she’s right good company, too, when everything’s going to suit her.” Thus she explained their intimacy, and together they went almost nightly to the moving pictures.
Elizabeth was lonesome, and had a good deal of spare time to kill. Some of it she killed in Aunt Sadie’s society. The rest she made away with by lying in bed late,—Mr. Bixby always got his own breakfast,—by fitful housekeeping, by gossip and cheap fiction, and by much attention to her clothes. And all that she did went by to the blare of popular songs ground out on her gramophone, for, as she told Aunt Sadie, “If there’s one thing I hate more’n another it’s nothin’ doin’. I got to have some kind of stir goin’ on all the time, if it’s nothin’ more’n the gramophone.”
Her uncertain and slovenly habits were the very antithesis of Julie’s well-ordered and conscientious ones. At a certain early hour Julie arose; at another certain hour she had her breakfast; and by another her rooms were tidied and her shop open for the day. After the Bixbys moved in, she became accustomed to hearing Mr. Bixby every morning at a regular time getting his own breakfast; his habits, when they did not depend on Elizabeth, were as methodical as her own. His breakfast varied in time not more than five minutes from morning to morning, but his dinner, which Elizabeth prepared, swung backward and forward across the face of the clock.
As Julie finished her own breakfast and started her house-cleaning for the day, she was used now to hearing Mr. Bixby’s tiptoe footsteps creeping about overhead. The footsteps were so timid, so stealthy, that she guessed he went in terror of an outburst of irritability from Elizabeth if he awakened her. He was not always successful in keeping quiet. One morning there was a sudden clatter and crash of tinware, and immediately on the heels of it, a flood of abuse from his wife.
When Mr. Bixby came down the outside stairs that morning Julie was sweeping her front steps. He paused after they had exchanged their customary shy good morning.
“I was mighty sorry I made all that racket right over your head just now,” he apologized awkwardly.
“Oh, that was all right,” she assured him quickly. “A person can’t help pans falling down sometimes.”
“It was the pie plates,” he confided. “Seems like they just stand there on edge watching their chance to jump down on a feller, and they ain’t never satisfied to let one of the bunch go alone, but all of ’em got to rattle down together.” There was in his eyes now that rueful twinkle which she had seen before. He offered it tentatively to her, a deprecatory, whimsical comment on his own inaptitude.