ou can always think up perfectly hypothetical
circumstances!" Jim said impatiently.

"Marriage is difficult enough," Julia pursued. "But marriage with a
handicap is impossible! To feel that there is something you can't
change, that never will change, and that stands eternally between you!
No, marriage isn't for us, Jim, and we can only make the best of it,
having made the original mistake!"

"Don't ever say that again--it's not true!" Jim said, with a sort of
masterful anger. "Now, listen a moment. That isn't true, and you don't
believe it. I've told you what I think of myself. I was blind, I was a
fool. But that's past. Give me another chance. I'll make you the
happiest woman in the world, Julia. I love you. I'll be so proud of you!
You can have a dozen girls under your wing all the time; you can answer
the Queen back, and I'll never have even a _thought_ but what you're the
finest and sweetest woman in the world!"

The preposterous picture brought a shaky smile to Julia's lips and a
hint of tears to her eyes. She suddenly rose from her seat and went down
to the garden.

"Our talking it over does no good, Jim," she said, as he followed her,
and stood looking at her and at Anna. "It's all too fresh--it's been
too terrible for me--getting adjusted! I stand firm here, I feel the
ground under my feet. I don't want to go back to feeling all wrong, all
out of key, helpless to straighten matters!"

"But we were happy!" he said, a passionate regret in his voice. "Think
of our day in Chicago, Ju, and the day we took a hansom cab through
Central Park--and were afraid the driver wasn't sober! And do you
remember the blue hat that _would_ catch on the electric light, and the
day the elevator stuck?"

"I think of it all so often, Jim," Julia answered, with a smile as sad
as tears could have been, and in the tender voice she might have used in
speaking of the dead. "Sometimes I fit whole days together, just
thinking of those old times. 'Then what did we do after that lunch?' I
think, or 'Where were we going that night that we were in such a hurry?'
and then by degrees it all comes back." Julia drew a rose toward her on
a tall bush, studied its leaves critically. "That was the happiest time,
wasn't it, Jim?" she asked, with her April smile.

Jim felt as if a weight of inevitable sorrow were weighing him to the
ground. Julia's quiet assurance, her regretful firmness, seemed to be
breaking his heart. She was in white to-day, an