riends to enjoy it with them. These were happy times; Emeline,
flushed and pretty in her improvised apron, queened it over the three or
four adoring males, and wondered why other women fussed so long over
cooking, when men so obviously enjoyed a steak, baked potatoes, canned
vegetables, and a pie from Swain's. After dinner the men always played
poker, a mild little game at first, with Emeline eagerly guarding a
little pile of chips, and gasping over every hand like a happy child;
but later more seriously, when Emeline, contrary to poker superstition,
sat on the arm of her husband's chair, to bring him luck.

Luck she certainly seemed to bring him; the Pages would go yawning to
bed, after one of these evenings, chuckling over the various hands.

"I couldn't see what you drew, George," Emeline would say, "but I could
see that Mack had aces on the roof, and it made me crazy to have you go
on raising that way! And then your three fish hooks!"

George would shout with pride at her use of poker terms--would laugh all
the harder if she used them incorrectly. And sometimes, sinking
luxuriously into the depths of the curly-maple bed, Emeline would think
herself the luckiest woman in the world. No hurry about getting up in
the morning; no one to please but herself; pretty gowns and an adoring
husband and a home beyond her maddest hopes--the girl's dreams no longer
followed her, happy reality had blotted out the dream.

She felt a little injured, a little frightened, when the day came on
which she must tell George of some pretty well-founded suspicions of her
own condition. George might be "mad," or he might laugh.

But George was wonderfully soothing and reassuring; more, was
pathetically glad and proud. He petted Emeline into a sort of reluctant
joy, and the attitude of her mother and sisters and the few women she
knew was likewise flattering. Important, self-absorbed, she waited her
appointed days, and in the early winter a wizened, mottled little
daughter was born. Julia was the name Emeline had chosen for a girl, and
Julia was the name duly given her by the radiant and ecstatic George in
the very first hour of her life. Emeline had lost interest in the
name--indeed, in the child and her father as well--just then; racked,
bewildered, wholly spent, she lay back in the curly-maple bed, the first
little seed of that general resentment against life that was eventually
to envelop her, forming in her mind.

They had told her th