It was noon before Helen Starratt finished her housework next morning—­an unusually late hour for her, but she had been preoccupied, and her movements slow in consequence.  A four-room apartment, with hardwood floors and a vacuum cleaner, was hardly a serious task for a full-grown woman, childless, and with a vigor that reacted perfectly to an ice-cold shower at 7 A.M.  She used to look back occasionally at the contrast her mother’s life had presented.  Even with a servant, a three-storied, bay-windowed house had not given Mrs. Somers much leisure for women’s clubs.  The Ladies Aid Society and a Christmas festival in the church parlors were about as far along the road of alleged social service as the woman of the last generation had traveled.  There was marketing to do, and sewing continually on hand, and house-cleaning at stated intervals.  In Helen Somers’s old home the daily routine had been as inflexible as its ancestor’s original Calvinistic creed—­Monday, washing; Tuesday, ironing; Wednesday, cleaning the silver; Thursday, at home to visitors; Friday, sweeping; Saturday, baking; and Sunday, the hardest day of all.  For, withal, the Puritan sense of observance, that had not been utterly swamped by the blue and enticing skies of California, Sunday was a feast day, not in a lightsome sense, but in a dull, heavy, gastronomic way, unleavened by either wine or passable wit.  On Sunday the men of the family returned home from church and gorged.  If the day were fine, perhaps everybody save mother took a cable-car ride, or a walk, or something equally exciting.  The sparkle of environment had won these people away from tombstone reading and family prayers as a Sabbath diversion, but even California could not be expected to make over a bluestocking in an eye’s twinkling.  Mother, of course, stayed home on Sunday to “pick up” and get ready for supper in the absence of the servant girl.  A later generation had the grace to elevate these slatternly drudges to the title of maid, but a sterner ancestry found it expedient to be more practical and less pretentious in its terms.  On these drab Sundays Helen Somers had passionately envied the children of foreign breed, who seemed less hedged about by sabbatical restrictions.  Not that she wished her family to be of the questionable sort that went to El Campo or Shell Mound Park for Sunday picnics and returned in quarrelsome state at a late hour smelling of bad whisky and worse gin.  Nor did she aspire to have sprung from the Teutonic stock that perpetrated more respectable but equally noisy outings in the vicinity of Woodward’s Gardens.  But she had a furtive and sly desire to float oil-like upon the surface of this turbid sea, touching it at certain points, yet scarcely mixing with it.  Indeed, this inclination to taste the core of life without committing herself the further indiscretion of swallowing it grew to such proportions that at the age of fifteen she almost succumbed to its allurement.  Even at this late date she could