ecome interested, and finally
pushed up the window the two inches that the girls approved, turned out
the lights, and jumped into bed. She would want her beauty sleep for
"The Amazons" to-morrow night. Julia had been fully determined, when she
got home, to abandon the amateur company, to fail them at the very hour
of their performance, but a casual word from Connie had caused her to
change her mind.

"Don't you be a fool and get in Dutch with Artheris!" Connie had said,
and upon sober reflection Julia had found the advice good.

But she got no beauty sleep that night. She lay hour after hour wakeful
and wretched, the jumbled memories of the last twenty-four hours
slipping through her mind in ceaseless review: the green, swift-rushing
water, with gulls flying over it; the coffee pot reflecting a dozen
joyous young faces; the garden bright with roses--

And then, with sickening regularity, the clubhouse and the girls'
voices--

How she hated them all, Julia said to herself, raising herself on one
elbow to punch her sodden pillow, and sending a hot, restless glance
toward the streak of bright light that forced its way in from a street
lamp. How selfish, how smug, how arrogant they were, with their daily
baths, and their chests full of fresh linen, and their assured speech!
What had Sally and Theodora Toland ever done to warrant their
insufferable conceit? Why should they have lovely parents and an ideal
home, frocks and maids and delightful meals, while she, Julia, was born
to the dirt and sordidness of O'Farrell Street?

Barbara--but no, she couldn't hate Barbara! The memory of that moment of
confidence last night still thrilled Julia to her heart's core. Barbara
had been kind to her in the matter of Carter Hazzard, had defended her
to-day, in her careless, indifferent fashion. Julia's heart ached with
fierce envy of Barbara, ached with fierce longing and admiration. She
tortured herself with a picture of the charm of Barbara's life: her
waking in the sunshine, her breakfast eaten between the old doctor and
the young, her hours at her pretty writing-desk, on the porch, at the
piano. Always dignified, always sweet and dainty, always adored.

Well, she, Julia, should be an actress, a great actress. But even as she
flung herself on her back and stared sternly up at the ceiling,
resolving it, her heart failed her. It was a long road. Julia was
fifteen; she must count upon ten or fifteen years at least of slavery in
sto