t Noble Dill got so mad at when they were calling, and Uncle Joe
laughed about, and I don't know who all! Anyhow, there's an awful lot
more than three, Aunt Julia."

Julia looked down with little favour upon the talkative caller. Florence
was seated upon the shady steps of the veranda, and Julia, dressed for a
walk, occupied a wicker chair above her. "Julia, dressed for a
walk"--how scant the words! It was a summer walk that Julia had dressed
for: and she was all too dashingly a picture of coolness on a hot day: a
brunette in murmurous white, though her little hat was a film of
blackest blue, and thus also in belt and parasol she had almost matched
the colour of her eyes. Probably no human-made fabric could have come
nearer to matching them, though she had once met a great traveller--at
least he went far enough in his search for comparisons--who told her
that the Czarina of Russia had owned a deep sapphire of precisely the
colour, but the Czarina's was the only sapphire yet discovered that had
it. One of Newland Sanders's longest Poems-to-Julia was entitled "Black
Sapphires."

Julia's harmonies in black sapphire were uncalled for. If she really had
been as kind as she was too often capable of looking, she would have
fastened patches over both eyes--one patch would have been useless--and
she would have worn flat shoes and patronized a dressmaker with genius
enough to misrepresent her. But Julia was not great enough for such
generosities: she should have been locked up till she passed sixty; her
sufferings deserve no pity.

And yet an attack of the mumps during the winter had brought Julia more
sympathy than the epidemic of typhoid fever in the Old Ladies' Infirmary
brought all of the nine old ladies who were under treatment there. Julia
was confined to her room for almost a month, during which a florist's
wagon seemed permanent before the house: and a confectioner's frequently
stood beside the florist's. Young Florence, an immune who had known the
mumps in infancy, became an almost constant attendant upon the patient,
with the result that the niece contracted an illness briefer than the
aunt's, but more than equalling it in poignancy, caused by the poor
child's economic struggle against waste. Florence's convalescence took
place in her own home without any inquiries whatever from the outer
world, but Julia's was spent in great part at the telephone. Even a poem
was repeated to her by the instrument:

How the worl