hat
life held some secret agony for every one, and that she must bear her
share of the world's burden. How had it all come about, she wondered.
Her thoughts went back to the honeymoon, and she had an aching memory of
Central Park in its fresh green, of Jim laughing at her when she tried
to be very matronly, in her kimono, over their breakfast tray. Oh, the
exquisite happy days, the cloudless, wonderful time!

She left the thought of it for the winter that followed. That had been
happy, too. Not like the New York months, not without its grave
misgivings, not without its hours of bitter pain, yet happy on the
whole. Then Honolulu, all so bright a memory until that hour on the
ship--that first horrible premonition of so much misery that was to
follow. The San Mateo summer had somehow widened the wordless,
mysterious gap between them, and the winter! Julia shuddered as she
thought of the winter. Where was her soul while her body danced and
dressed and dined and slept through those hot hours? Where was any one's
soul in that desperate whirl of amusement?

But she had found her soul again, on the June day of Anna's coming. And
with Anna had come to her what new hopes and fears, what new
potentialities and new sensibilities! She had always been silent,
reserved, stoical by nature, accepting what life brought her
uncomprehendingly, only instinctively and steadily fighting toward that
ideal that had so long ago inspired her girlhood. Now she was awake,
quivering with exquisite emotions, trembling with eagerness to adjust
her life, and taste its full delicious savour. Now she wanted to laugh
and to talk, to sit singing to her baby in the firelight, to run to meet
her husband and fling herself into his arms for pure joy in life, and
joy that she was beautiful and young and mother of the dearest baby in
the world, and wife of the wisest and best of men. The past was blotted
out for Julia now; her place in society was undisputed, not only as the
wife of the rich young consulting surgeon, but for herself as well, and
she could make as little or as much as she pleased of society's claim.
From her sickness she felt as if she had learned that there is suffering
and sorrow enough in the world without the need of deliberately
sustaining the old and long-atoned wrongs. More than that, she had come
to regard her own fine sense of right as a safer guide than any other,
and by this she was absolved of the shadowy sin of her girlhood: the
ye