There was an interval of intense silence.

“Did you faint?” Peachy asked in an awed voice.

“I wept.”

“You wept, Julia?” Peachy said.  “You!”

“I had not wept since my childhood.  It was strange.  It frightened me almost as much as the fall.  Oh, how fast the tears came — and in such floods!  Something melted and went away from me then.  A softness came over me.  It was like a spell.  I have never been the same creature since.  I cry easily now.”

“Did you tell Billy?” Clara asked.

“He saw me,” Julia answered.

“He saw — .”  It came from her four listeners as from one woman.

“That’s what changed him.  That’s what determined him to help capture us.  He said that he was afraid I would try it again.  I wouldn’t have, though.”

Nobody spoke for a long time.

“Julia!  It was Chiquita who broke the silence this time.  There is something I, too, have always wanted to ask you.  But I have never dared before.  What was it tempted you to go into the Clubhouse that day?  At first you tried to keep us from going in.  You never seemed to care for any of the things they gave us.  You threw away the fans and the slippers and the scarfs.  And you smashed your mirror.”

“Billy asked me this same question once,” Julia answered.  “It was that big diamond — the Wilmington ‘Blue.’  I caught a glimpse of it through the doorway as it lay all by itself on the table, flashing in the sunlight.  I had never before in my life seen any thing that I really wanted.  But this was so exquisite, so chiseled, so tiny, so perfect, There 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!’”