s leaning against Julia's shoulder as
Julia read and reread the little document. The mother looked down
obliquely at the little rose-leaf face, the blue, blue eyes, the fresh,
firm, baby mouth.

"When I am a grown-up girl," Anna said, with her sweet, mysterious
smile, "I shall have letters, and I will write answers, and write the
envelopes, too! And I'll write you letters, Mother, when you go 'way and
leave me with Grandma!"

"Will you?" asked Julia, rubbing the child's soft cheek with her own.

"Every day!" Anna said. "Who's writing you with that cunning little owl
on the paper, Mother?"

"That's the Bohemian Club owl," Julia evaded, giving Anna only one fair
look at him before she closed the letter. She went to her desk, and
swiftly, unhesitatingly, wrote her reply. Jim must excuse her, she could
not see the advantage of their meeting, she would much prefer not to see
him. Briskly rubbing her blotter over the flap of the sealed envelope,
she had a vision of him, interrupting his evening of talk with old
friends to scratch off the note to her, and felt that she detested him.

An unhappy week followed, in which Julia had time to feel that almost
any consequences would have been easier to bear than the unassailable
wall of silence and misgiving and doubt that hemmed her in. Constant
nervous terrors weakened her spiritually and bodily, and she could not
bear to have Anna for one moment out of her sight. Mrs. Page and Mrs.
Torney saw notice in the papers of Jim's return, and suspected the cause
of this new agitation in Julia, but neither dared attempt to force her
confidence.

"Men are the limit!" said Mrs. Torney to her sister, one day when they
were sitting together in the kitchen. "As I've said before, it's a great
pity there ain't nothing else to do but marry, and nothing to marry but
men! It's awful to think of the hundreds of women who spend their
happiest hours going about doing the housework, and planning just what
they'd do if their husbands was to be taken off suddenly! Some girls can
set around until they're blue moulded, and never a feller to ask 'em,
and others the boys'll fret and pleg until they're fit to be tied, with
nerves! Evvy you couldn't marry off if she was Cleopatra on the Nile,
and poor Julia could hang smallpox flags all over her, and every man in
the place'd want her jest the same! He wants her back, you see if he
doesn't!"

"I don't know that he does," said Emeline, knitting needles flas