ere was
so much fire and color in it. It seemed like a living creature. I was
enchanted by it. When I told Billy, he laughed. He said that the
lust for diamonds was a recognized earth-disease among earth-people,
especially earth-women. He said that many women had been ruined by it.
He said that it was a common saying among men that you could catch any
woman in a trap baited with diamonds. I have never got over the sting
of that. I blush always when I think of it. Because--although I don't
exactly understand why--it was not quite true in my case. That is a
thing which always bothers me in conversation with the men. They talk
about us as if they knew all about us. You'd think they'd invented us.
Not that we're not simple enough. We're perfectly simple, but they've
never bothered to study us. They say so many things about us, for
instance, that are only half true--and yet I don't know exactly how to
confute them. None of us would presume to say such things about them.
I'm glad," she ended with a sudden fierceness, "that I threw the diamond
away."

"Julia," and now it was Lulu who questioned, "why do you not marry
Billy when you love him so?" The seriousness of her tone, the warmth
of affection in her little brown face robbed this question of any
appearance of impertinence.

"Lulu," Julia answered simply, "I don't know why. Only that something
inside has always said, 'Wait!'"

"Well, you did well," Peachy said bitterly, "for, at least, Billy
loves you just as much as at first. I don't see him racing over to the
Clubhouse the moment his dinner is eaten. I don't see him spending his
Sundays in long exploring tramps. I don't see him making plans to go off
into the interior for a week at a time."

"But he would be just like all the others, Julia," Clara exclaimed
carefully, "if you'd married him. Keep out of it as long as you can!"

"Don't ever marry him, Julia," Chiquita warned. "Keep your life a
perpetual wooing."

"Marry him to-morrow, Julia," Lulu advised. "Oh, I cannot think what my
life would have been without Honey-Boy and Honey-Bunch."

"I shall marry Billy sometime," Julia said. "But I don't know when. When
that little inner voice stops saying, 'Wait!'"

"I wonder," Peachy questioned again, "what would have happened if--"

"It would have come out just the same way. Depend on that!" Chiquita
said philosophically. "It was our fate--the Great Doom that our people
used to talk of. And, after all, it's our own fa