“Well, she’s mighty peculiar,” Mrs. Watkins repeated. “I reckon she must be cracked.”
“But she looks so strange, so—so awful,” Julie persisted.
“Well, she’s really lookin’ better than usual right now. She has spells when she don’t come out of her room for days together, when she don’t even pretend to fix herself up. You think she’s awful looking now; but you just ought to see her then. She just stays shut up in that room and don’t see a soul except her canary bird, if you could call that a soul—just for days. I don’t know what in the world she does with herself—just sits an’ mopes, I reckon.”
“But don’t people go in to see her, to see what’s the trouble?”
“Oh, she don’t thank you to: she’s mighty peculiar, I tell you. An’ proud—who-ee! It’s enough to kill you with laughing, but that old rag-bag that looks like she hadn’t washed herself for a week—she thinks herself better’n anybody in this house. Wouldn’t that kill you? That’s because she used to go out sewing for some of the grand people here in town. That’s her trade—dressmaking.”
“Oh, well, then she and I ought to get along,” Julie cried eagerly. “I’ll go to see her. I hate to have any one look so awful.”
“She won’t thank you an’ she won’t see you; she’ll just slam the door in your face. She seems like she’s mighty suspicious of every one. She won’t have a thing to do with anybody, I tell you.”
“I’m going to see her just the same,” Julie persisted. “It’s awful—the look in her face, I mean. It’s like she hadn’t a friend in the world.”
“She won’t let anybody be friends with her, she’s so proud an’ touchy, an’ so peculiar.” Mrs. Watkins hastened to defend the neighborliness of the house. “People ain’t going to put up with it. Some of the ladies she sewed for used to come to see her and bring her things, but she’s so stand-offish even with them that they’ve about quit comin’.”
“What does she live on?” Julie inquired.