The scene was not new, but it kept a fascination for her, like a transformation scene in a pantomime. Mr. J. Cleveland Kent, the manager of the shoe factory, who had taken her in to dinner, had been leaning out of a factory window in his shirt-sleeves, his black hair tumbled, and badly in need of a shave, when she passed on her way home from school. He looked mysterious and interesting in a dinner coat, like her idea of an Italian nobleman.
When Judith knocked at the kitchen door to deliver a note, Mrs. Theodore Burr, in a pink cooking apron, corsetless, and with her beautiful yellow hair in patent curlers, had been blackening the kitchen stove, and quarrelling with the furnace man about an overcharge of fifty cents on his monthly bill. The Burrs had no maid. Theodore Burr had been assisting Judge Saxon ever since he passed his bar examinations, but he was not admitted to partnership yet. This was beginning to make gossip, for he worked hard. He had broken his dinner engagement to-night, as he often did, to stay at home and work. Randolph Sebastian, the secretary, with the queer, hybrid foreign name, and thin face and ingratiating brown eyes, had his place at the table.
Mrs. Burr, stately and slender now in jetted black, the lowest cut gown in the room, her yellow hair fluffing and flaring into an unbelievable number of well-filled-out puffs, was chattering to the Colonel in a low voice, so that Judith could not understand, and breaking into French at intervals--Green River High School French, but she spoke it with an air, narrowing her blue-gray eyes after an alluring fashion she had and laughing her full-toned laugh. She was a full-blown, emphatic creature, though she had been married only three years, and was Lil Gaynor still to half the town.
Auburn-haired little Mrs. Kent had been lying down all the afternoon, as her disapproving domestic had informed any one who inquired at the door in a shrill voice that did not promote repose. She was very piquant and enticing now, with her bright, slanting hazel eyes, and a contagious laugh, but her dinner partner, Judith's father, was tired and hard to amuse. He looked very boyish when he was tired; his blue eyes looked large and pathetic.