wer the telephone, stop again to kiss her daughter's little bumped
nose, and yet find in her tired soul and body enough love and energy to
put a pastry "A. M." on the top of her pie, to amuse the head of the
house when he should cut into it that night.

But this mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime was not for Julia.
And just as Kennedy had adjusted herself to the life of a poor man's
wife, so Julia must adjust herself to her own so different destiny.

And adjust herself she did. Nobody dreamed of the thoughts that went on
behind the beautiful blue eyes, nobody found little Mrs. Studdiford
anything but charming. With that steadfast, serious resolution that had
marked her all her life, Julia set herself to the study of gowns, of
dinners, of small talk. She kept a slim little brown Social Register on
her dressing-table, and pored over it at odd moments; she listened
attentively to the chatter that went on all about her. She drew
infinitely less satisfaction from the physical evidences of her
success--her beauty, her wealth, her handsome husband, and her
popularity--than any one of the women who envied her might have done,
yet she did draw some satisfaction, loved her pretty gowns, the freedom
of bared white neck and shoulders, the atmosphere of perfumed
drawing-rooms and glittering dinner tables. She wrote long letters to
Barbara, was a devoted godmother to Theodora Carleton's tiny son, loved
to have Miss Toland with her for an occasional visit, and perhaps once a
month went over to Sausalito, to spoil the old doctor with her
affectionate attentions, hold long conferences with their mother on the
subject of the girls' love affairs, and fall into deep talks with
Richie--perhaps the happiest talks in her life, for Richie, whose mind
and body had undergone for long years the exquisite discipline of pain,
was delightfully unexpected in his views, and his whole lean, ungainly
frame vibrated with the eager joy of expressing them.

Perhaps once a month, too, Julia went to see her own mother, calls which
always left her definitely depressed. Emeline was becoming more and more
crippled with rheumatism, the old grandmother was now the more brisk of
the two. May's two younger girls, Muriel and Geraldine, were living
there now, as Marguerite and Evelyn had done; awkward, dark, heavy-faced
girls who attended the High School. Julia's astonishing rise in life had
necessarily affected her relatives, but much less, she realized in u