silk dress and deep
lace collar. Julia always had several chocolates from the boxes that
circulated among her elders, and usually went to sleep during the last
act, and was dragged home, blinking and whining and wretched, by one
aching little arm.

George was passionately devoted to his little girl, and no toy was too
expensive for Julia to demand. Emeline loved the baby, too, although she
accepted as a martyrdom the responsibility of supplying Julia's needs.
But the Pages themselves rather drifted apart with the years. Both were
selfish, and each accused the other of selfishness, although, as Emeline
said stormily, no one had ever called her that before she was married,
and, as George sullenly claimed, he himself had always been popularity's
self among the "fellows."

In all her life Emeline had never felt anything but a resentful
impatience for whatever curtailed her liberty or disturbed her comfort
in the slightest degree. She had never settled down to do cheerfully
anything that she did not want to do. She had shaken off the claims of
her own home as lightly as she had stepped from "Delphine's" to the more
tempting position of George's wife. Now she could not believe that she
was destined to live on with a man who was becoming a confirmed
dyspeptic, who thought she was a poor housekeeper, an extravagant
shopper, a wretched cook, and worse than all, a sloven about her
personal appearance. Emeline really was all these things at times, and
suspected it, but she had never been shown how to do anything else, and
she denied all charges noisily.

One night when Julia was about four George stamped out of the house,
after a tirade against the prevailing disorder and some insulting
remarks about "delicatessen food." Emeline sent a few furious remarks
after him, and then wept over the sliced ham, the potato salad, and the
Saratoga chips, all of which she had brought home from a nearby delicacy
shop in oily paper bags only an hour ago. She wandered disconsolately
through the four rooms that had been her home for nearly six years. The
dust lay thick on the polished wood and glass of the sideboard and glass
closet in the dining-room; ashes and the ends of cigarettes filled half
a dozen little receptacles here and there; a welter of newspapers had
formed a great drift in a corner of the room, and the thick velour day
cover of the table had been pushed back to make way for a doubled and
spotted tablecloth and the despised meal.