“Honestly, I didn’t!” Mrs. Arbuthnot protested.  “I remember my brother Billy saying, ’Babs, you don’t think Dr. Arbuthnot is coming here to see me, do you?’ and then it all came over me!  Why, I was only eighteen.”

“And engaged to Billy’s chum,” said the doctor.

“Well,” said the wife, naively, “he knew all along it wasn’t serious.”

“You must have been a rose,” said Miss Ives, “and I would have hated you!  Now, when I went to dances,” she pursued half seriously, “I sat in one place and smiled fixedly, and watched the other girls dance.  Or I talked with great animation to the chaperons.  Ann, I’ve felt sometimes that I would gladly die, to have the boys crowd around me just once, and grab my card and scribble their names all over it.  I didn’t dress very well, or dance very well—­and I never could talk to boys.”  She began to trace a little watercourse in the sand with an exquisite finger tip.  “I was the most unhappy girl on earth, I think!  I felt every birthday was a separate insult—­twenty, and twenty-two, and twenty-four!  We were poor, and life was—­oh, not dramatic or big!—­but just petty and sordid.  I used to rage because the dining-room was the only place for the sewing-machine, and rage because my bedroom was really a back parlor.  Well!—­I joined a theatrical company—­came away.  And many a night, tired out and discouraged, I’ve cried myself to sleep because I’d never have any girlhood again!”

She stopped with a half-apologetic laugh.  The doctor was watching her with absorbed, bright eyes.  Mrs. Arbuthnot, unable to imagine youth without joy and beauty, protested: 

“Julie—­I don’t believe you—­you’re exaggerating!  Do you mean you didn’t go on the stage until you were twenty-four!”

“I was twenty-six.  I was leading lady my second season, and starred my third,” said the actress, without enthusiasm.  “I was starred in ‘The Jack of Clubs.’  It ran a season in New York and gave me my start.  Lud, how tired we all got of it!”

“And then I hope you went back home, Ju, and were lionized,” said the other woman, vigorously.

“Oh, not then!  No, I’d been meaning to go—­and meaning to go—­all those three years.  The little sisters used to write me—­such forlorn little letters!—­and mother, too—­but I couldn’t manage it.  And then—­the very night ‘Jack’ played the three hundredth time, as it happened—­I had this long wire from Sally and Beth.  Mother was very ill, wanted me—­they’d meet a certain train, they were counting the hours—­”

Miss Ives demolished her watercourse with a single sweep of her palm.  There was a short silence.

“Well!” she said, breaking it.  “Mother got well, as it happened, and I went home two months later.  I had the guest room, I remember.  Sally was everything to mother then, and I tried to feel glad.  Beth was engaged.  Every one was very flattering and very kind in the intervals left by engagements and weddings and new babies and family gatherings.  Then I came back to ‘Jack,’ and we went on the road.  And then I broke down and a strange doctor in a strange hospital put me together again,” she went on with a flashing smile and a sudden change of tone, “and his wholly adorable wife sent me double white violets!  And they—­the Arbuthnots, not the violets—­were the nicest thing that ever happened to me!”