Julia made a little grimace over her letters.

“Oh, come off, now!” her husband railed good-naturedly.  “You know you love it.  You know you like to dress up and trot about with me and be admired!”

“I like to trot about with you,” Julia conceded, sighing in spite of her smile.  “But I get very tired of dinners.  Some other woman gets you, and some other woman’s husband gets me, and we say such flat things, about motor cars, or the theatre—­nothing friendly or intimate or interesting!”

“Wait until you know them all better, Ju.  Besides, you couldn’t get intimate at a dinner, very well.  Besides”—­Jim defended the institutions of his class—­“you didn’t look very gay when young Jo Coutts seemed inclined to get very friendly at dinner the other night!”

“Jo Coutts was drunk,” Julia asserted briefly.  “As they very often are,” she added severely.  “Not raging drunk, but just silly, or sentimental and important, you know.”

“I know,” Jim laughed.

“And it makes me furious!” Julia said.  “As for knowing them better, they aren’t one bit more interesting when they’re old friends.  They’re more familiar, I admit that, but all this cheeky yelling back and forth isn’t interesting—­it’s just tiresome!  ’I’m holding your husband’s hand, Alice!’ ’All right, then I’m going to kiss your husband!’” Her voice rose in mimicry.  “And then Kenneth Roberts tells some little shady story, and every one screams, and every one goes on telling it over and over!  Why, that little silly four-line verse Conrad Kent had last night—­every one in the room had to learn it by heart and say it six hundred times before we were done with it!”

“You’re a cynic, woman,” Jim said, kissing his wife, who by this time had come around to his chair.  “It’s all too easy for you, that’s the trouble!  They’ve accepted you with open arms; you’re the rage!  You ought to have been kept for a while on the anxious seat, like the poor Groves, and Mrs. McCann; then you’d appreciate High Sassiety!”

“Well, I wouldn’t make myself ridiculous and pathetic like the Groves, trying to burst into society, and giving people a chance to snub me!” Julia said thoughtfully.  “Never mind,” she added, “next month Lent begins, and then there must be some let-up!”

However, Lent had only begun when the Studdifords made a flying trip to Honolulu, where Jim had a patient.  The great liner was fascinating to Julia, and, as usual, her beauty and charm, and the famous young surgeon’s unostentatious bigness, made them friends on all sides, so that the life of cocktail mixing and card playing and gossip went on as merrily as it had in San Francisco.  Julia could not spend the empty days staring dreamily out at the rolling green Pacific; every man on board was anxious to improve her acquaintance, from the Captain to the seventeen-year-old little English lad who was going out to his father in India, and to not one of them did it ever occur that lovely little Mrs. Studdiford might prefer to be left alone.