“Damn it, the thing either counts or it doesn’t count!” Jim muttered, striding down Market Street, past darkened shops and corners where lights showed behind the swinging doors of saloons.  Either it was all important or it was not important at all.  With most women, all important, of course.  With Julia—­Jim let his mind play for a few minutes with the thought of renunciation.  There would be no trouble with Julia, and Aunt Sanna could easily be silenced.

He shook the mere vision from him with an angry shake of the head.  She belonged to him now, his little steadfast, serious girl.  And she had deceived them all these years!  Not that he could blame her for it!  Naturally, Aunt Sanna would never have overlooked that, and presumably no other woman would have engaged her, knowing it, even to wash dishes and sweep steps.

“Lord, what a world for women!” thought Jim, in simple wonder.  Hunted down mercilessly, pushed at the first sign of weakening, they know not where, and then lost!  Hundreds of thousands of them forever outcast, to pay through all the years that are left to them for that hour of yielding!  Hundreds of thousands of them, and his Julia only different because she had made herself so—­

It seemed to Jim, in his club now, and sunk in a deep chair before the wood fire in the quiet library, that he could never marry her.  It must simply be his sorrow to have loved Julia—­God, how he did love her!

But, through all their years together, there must not be that shadow upon their happiness; it was too hideous to be endured.  “It must be endured,” mused Jim wretchedly.  “It is true!

“Anyway,” he went on presently, rousing himself, “the thing is no more important than I choose to make it.  Ordinarily, yes.  But in this case the thing to be considered is its effect on Julia’s character, and if ever any soul was pure, hers is!

“And if we marry, we must simply make up our minds that the past is dead!” And suddenly Jim’s heart grew lighter, and the black mood of the past hour seemed to drop.  He stretched himself luxuriously and folded his arms.  “If Julia isn’t a hundred per cent, sweeter and better and finer than these friends of Babbie’s, who go chasing about to bad plays and read all the rottenest books that are printed,” he said, “then there’s no such thing as a good woman!  My little girl—­I’m not half worthy of her, that’s the truth!”

“Hello, Jim!” said Gray Babcock, coming in from the theatre, and stretching his long cold hands over the dying fire.  “We thought you might come in to-night.  Hazzard and Tom Parley had a little party for Miss Manning, of the ‘Dainty Duchess’ Company, you know--awfully pretty girl, straight, too, they say.  There were a couple of other girls, and Roy Grinell—­things were just about starting up when I came away!”

Jim rose, and kicked the scattered ends of a log toward the flame.

“I’ve not got much use for Hazzard,” he observed, frowning.