“I am,” said Miss Ives, buoyantly.  “I don’t know about Jim.  At Jim’s age every step counts, I suppose.  These fashionable doctors habitually overeat and oversleep, I understand, and it makes them lazy.”

“I am going in, Ann,” said the doctor, with dignity, rising from the sand and pointedly addressing his wife.  A few moments later he and Julie joyously breasted the sleepy roll of the low breakers, and pushed their way steadily through the smoother water beyond.

“Oh, that was glorious, Jim!” gasped the actress, as they gained the raft that was always their goal and pulling herself up to sit siren-wise upon it.  She was breathless, radiant, bubbling with the joy of sun and air and green water.  She took off her cap and let the sunlight beat on her loosened braids.

“How you love the water, Julie!”

“Yes—­best of all.  I’m never so satisfied as when I’m in it!”

“You never look so happy as when you are,” he said.

“Oh, these are happy days!” said Julie.  “I wish they could last forever.  Just resting and playing—­wouldn’t you like a year of it, Jim?”

The doctor eyed her quietly.

“I don’t know that I would,” he said seriously, impersonally.

There was a little silence.  Then the girl began to pin up her braids with fingers that trembled a little.

“Ann’s waving!” she said presently, and the doctor caught up her scarlet cap to signal back to the far blur on the beach that was Ann.  He watched the tiny distant groups a moment.

“Here comes your admirer!” said he.

“Where?” Julie was ready at once to slip into the water.

“Oh—­finish your hair—­take your time!  She’s just in the breakers.  We’ll be off long before she gets here.”

“That reminds me, Jim,” Miss Ives was quite herself again, “that when I was in the bath-house a few moments ago your Dancing Girl and that pretty little girl who is visiting her came into the next room.  You know how flimsy the walls are?  I could hear every word they said.”

“If you’d been a character in a story, Ju, you’d have felt it your duty to cough!”

“Well, I didn’t,” grinned Miss Ives; “not that I wanted to hear what they were saying.  I didn’t even know who they were until I heard little Miss Carter say solemnly, ’Ethel, I used to want mamma to get that Forty-eighth Street house, and I used to want to do Europe, but I think if I had one wish now, it would be to do something that would make everybody know me—­and everybody talk about me.  I’d love to be pointed out wherever I went.  I’d love to have people stare at me.  I’d like to be just as popular and just as famous as Julia Ives!’”

“She has got it badly, Ju!” the doctor observed.

“She has.  And it will be fuel on the flames to have me start to swim back to shore while she is swimming as hard as she can to the raft!” said the lady, tucking the last escaping lock under her cap and springing up for the plunge that started the home trip.