it a farce for me to
talk of uplifting girls by settlement work, as people are eternally
making me talk! Or if only every one _knew_ it, it would be easier, for
then I would feel at least that I stood on my own feet! But now, of
course, that's impossible, on Jim's account. What a horrible scandal it
would be, what a horrible thing it _is_, that any girl can cloud her own
life in this way!

"As for boys, I suppose mighty few of them are pure by the time they're
through college, by the time they're through High School, perhaps! It's
all queer, for that involves girls and women, too, thousands of them!
And how absurd it would be to bring such a charge as this against a man,
ten years after it happened, when he was married and a respectable
citizen!

"Well, society is very queer; civilization hasn't got very far;
sometimes I think virtue is a good deal of an accident, and that people
take themselves pretty seriously!" And so musing, Julia dozed, and
wakened, and dozed again. But in her heart had been sowed the seed that
was never to be uprooted, the little seed of doubt: doubt of the social
structure, doubt of its grave authorities, its awe-inspired
interpreters. What were the mummers all so busy about and how little
their mummery mattered! This shall be permitted, this shall not be
permitted; what is in your heart and brain concerns us not at all; where
your soul spends its solitudes is not our affair; so that you keep a
certain surface smoothness, so that you dress and talk and spend as we
bid you, you--for such time as we please--shall be one of us!

CHAPTER III

Nevertheless, the young Studdifords, upon their return to San Francisco,
entered heartily upon the social joys of the hour. Barbara had been only
waiting their arrival to demurely announce her engagement, and Julia's
delight immediately took the form of dinners and theatre parties for the
handsome Miss Toland and her fiance. A new and softened sweetness marked
Barbara in these days; she was more gentle and more charming than she
had ever been before. Captain Edward Francis Humphry Gunther Fox was an
officer in the English army, a blond, silent man of forty, with kind
eyes and a delightfully modulated voice. He had a comfortable private
income, a "place" in Oxfordshire, an uncle, young and healthy to be
sure, but still a lord, and an older sister who had married a lord, so
that his credentials were unexceptionable, and Mrs. Toland was nearly as
happy