The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story Of Julia Page, by Kathleen Norris

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Title: The Story Of Julia Page
Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V.

Author: Kathleen Norris

Release Date: December 22, 2004 [EBook #4787]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: "It has never occurred to one of you to ask _why_ I am
different from other women--to ask just what made me so!"]

THE STORY OF JULIA PAGE

BY KATHLEEN NORRIS

_Frontispiece by C. Allan Gilbert_

1915

CHAPTER I

To Emeline, wife of George Page, there came slowly, in her thirtieth
year, a sullen conviction that life was monstrously unfair. From a
resentful realization that she was not happy in her marriage, Emeline's
mind went back to the days of her pert, precocious childhood and her
restless and discontented girlhood, and she felt, with a sort of
smouldering fury, that she had never been happy, had never had a fair
chance, at all!

It took Mrs. Page some years to come to this conclusion, for, if she was
shrewd and sharp among the women she knew, she was, in essential things,
an unintelligent woman, and mental effort of any sort was strange to
her. Throughout her entire life, her mind had never been truly awakened.
She had scrambled through Grammar School, and had followed it with five
years as saleswoman in a millinery store, in that district of San
Francisco known as the Mission, marrying George Page at twenty-three,
and up to that time well enough pleased with herself and her life.

But that was eight years ago. Now Emeline could see that she had
reached--more, she had passed--her prime. She began to see that the
moods of those early years, however violent and changing, had been fed
upon secret springs of hope, hope vague and baseless enough, but strong
to colour a girl's life with all the brightness of a thousand dawns.
There had been rare potentialities in those days, anything might happen,
something _would_ happen. The little Emeline Cox, moving between the
dreary discomf