George
laughed, and entered into her mood. He thought her a very smart little
girl, as indeed she was. She had a precocious knowledge of the affairs
of her mother's friends, sordid affairs enough, and more sordid than
ever when retailed by a child's fresh mouth. Julia talked of money
trouble, of divorce, of dressmaker's bills, of diseases; she repeated
insolent things that had been said to her in the street, and her
insolent replies; her rich, delicious laugh broke out over the memory of
the "drunk" that had been thrown out of Cassidy's.

George laughed at it all; it sounded very funny to him, coming from this
very small person, with her round, serious eyes, and her mop of gold. He
asked her what she wanted him to bring her next time he came home, and
Julia said black boots with white tops and tassels, and made him laugh
again.

Thus early did Julia act as a mediator between her parents, but of this
particular occasion she had no recollection, nor of much that followed
it. Had she been a few years older she might really have affected a
lasting reconciliation between them, for all that was best in George
made him love his daughter, and Emeline was intensely proud of the
child. As it was, Julia was too young. She might unconsciously be the
means of reuniting them now and then, but she could not at all grasp the
situation, and when she was not quite seven a decree of divorce, on the
ground of desertion, set both Emeline and George free, after eight years
of married life.

Emeline was too frightened at the enormity of the thing to be either
glad or sorry. She had never meant to go so far. She had threatened
George with divorce just as George had threatened her, in the heat of
anger, practically since her wedding day. But the emotion that finally
drove Emeline to a lawyer was not anger, it was just dull rebellion
against the gray, monotonous level of her days. She was alone when
George was away on trips; she was not less alone when he was in town. He
had formed the habit of joining "the boys" in the evening; he was surly
and noncommittal with his wife, but Julia, hanging about the lower hall
door or playing with children in the street, always heard a burst of
laughter as he joined his friends; everybody in the world--except
Emeline--liked George!

Poor Emeline--she could easily have held him! A little tenderness toward
him, a little interest in her home and her child, and George would have
been won again. Had he but on