“Well!” Julia put the faintest shadow of a kiss on his forehead, then got abruptly to her feet and crossed the room, as if she found his nearness suddenly insufferable.  “I can’t break my engagement to you this way, Jim,” said she.  “For even if I told you a thousand times that I had stopped loving you”—­a spasm of pain crossed her face, she shut her hands tightly together over her heart—­“even then you would know that I love you with my whole soul,” she said in a whisper with shut eyes.  “But you see,” and Julia turned a pitiful smile upon him, “you see there’s something you don’t understand, Jim!  You say I have climbed up alone, from being a tough little would-be actress, who lived over a saloon in O’Farrell Street, to this!  You say—­and your aunt says—­that I am wise, wise to see what is worth having, and to work for it!  But has it never occurred to one of you—­” Julia’s voice, which had been rising steadily, sank to a cold, low tone.  “No,” she said, as if to herself, sitting down at the table, and resting her arms upon it.  “No, it has never occurred to one of them to ask why I am different—­to ask just what made me so!  Life boils itself down to this, doesn’t it?” she went on, staring drearily at the shadowy corner of the room beyond her.  “That women have something to sell, or give away, and the question is just how much each one can get for it!  That’s what makes the most insignificant married woman feel superior to the happiest and richest old maid.  She says to herself, ‘I’ve made my market.  Somebody chose me!’ That’s what motherhood and homemaking rest on:  the whole world is just one great big question of sex, spinning away in space!  And even after a woman is married, she still plays with sex; she likes to feel that men admire her, doesn’t she?  At dinners there must be a man for every woman; at dances no two girls must dance together!  And here, the minute a new girl comes to join my clubs, I try to read her face.  Is she pure, or has she already thrown away—­”

“Julia, dear!” said Jim, amazed and troubled, but she silenced him with a quick gesture.  Her cheeks were burning now, and her words came fast.

“Those poor little girls at St. Anne’s,” she said feverishly, “they’ve thrown their lives away because this thing that is in the air all about them came too close.  They were too young legally to be trusted as Nature has trusted them for years!  They heard people talk of it, and laugh about it—­it didn’t seem very dangerous—­”

“Julia!” Jim said again, pleadingly.

“Just one moment, Jim, and I’ll be done!  When they had learned their lesson, when they had found out what sorrow it brought, when they knew that there was only loss and shame in it for them—­then it was too late!  Then men, and women, too, expected them to go on giving; there was nothing else to do.  Oh,” said Julia, in a heartbreaking voice, bringing her locked hands down upon the table as if she were in physical agony, “if the law would only take a hand before and not afterward!  Or if, when they are sick to death of men, they could believe that time would wash it all away; that there was clean, good work for them somewhere in the world!”