l
and important, you know."

"I know," Jim laughed.

"And it makes me furious!" Julia said. "As for knowing them better, they
aren't one bit more interesting when they're old friends. They're more
familiar, I admit that, but all this cheeky yelling back and forth isn't
interesting--it's just tiresome! 'I'm holding your husband's hand,
Alice!' 'All right, then I'm going to kiss your husband!'" Her voice
rose in mimicry. "And then Kenneth Roberts tells some little shady
story, and every one screams, and every one goes on telling it over and
over! Why, that little silly four-line verse Conrad Kent had last
night--every one in the room had to learn it by heart and say it six
hundred times before we were done with it!"

"You're a cynic, woman," Jim said, kissing his wife, who by this time
had come around to his chair. "It's all too easy for you, that's the
trouble! They've accepted you with open arms; you're the rage! You ought
to have been kept for a while on the anxious seat, like the poor Groves,
and Mrs. McCann; then you'd appreciate High Sassiety!"

"Well, I wouldn't make myself ridiculous and pathetic like the Groves,
trying to burst into society, and giving people a chance to snub me!"
Julia said thoughtfully. "Never mind," she added, "next month Lent
begins, and then there must be some let-up!"

However, Lent had only begun when the Studdifords made a flying trip to
Honolulu, where Jim had a patient. The great liner was fascinating to
Julia, and, as usual, her beauty and charm, and the famous young
surgeon's unostentatious bigness, made them friends on all sides, so
that the life of cocktail mixing and card playing and gossip went on as
merrily as it had in San Francisco. Julia could not spend the empty days
staring dreamily out at the rolling green Pacific; every man on board
was anxious to improve her acquaintance, from the Captain to the
seventeen-year-old little English lad who was going out to his father in
India, and to not one of them did it ever occur that lovely little Mrs.
Studdiford might prefer to be left alone.

But the sea air shook Julia into splendid health and energy, and she was
her sweetest self in Honolulu; she and Jim both seemed to recapture here
some of the exquisite tenderness of their honeymoon a year ago. Neither
would admit that there had been any drifting apart, they had never been
less than lovers, yet now they experienced the delights of a
reconciliation. Julia, in her delicate li