They would come home together late and silent.  Ellie would come in to help her lovely mistress out of the spangled gown, to lift the glittering band from her bright hair.  And because of Ellie, and because Jim usually was dressed and gone before she was up in the morning, Julia had a room to herself now.  She would have much preferred to breakfast with her lord, but Jim himself forbade it.

“No, no, no, Ju!  It’s not necessary, and you’re much better off in bed.  That’s the time for you to get a little extra rest.  No human being can stand the whole season without making some rest up somehow!  You’ll see the girls begin to drop with nervous prostration in January; Barbara used to lose twenty pounds every winter.  And I won’t have you getting pale.  Just take things easy in the morning, and sleep as late as you can!”

Julia accepted the verdict mildly.  With the opening of her second winter in San Francisco’s most exclusive set, she had tried to analyze the whole situation, honestly putting her prejudices on one side, and attempting to get her husband’s point of view.  It was the harder because she had hoped to be to Jim just what Kennedy Marbury was to Anthony, united by a thousand needs, little and big, by the memory of a thousand little comedies and tragedies.  Kennedy, who worried about bills and who dreaded the coming of the new baby, could stop making a pie to administer punishment and a lecture to her oldest son, stop again to answer the telephone, stop again to kiss her daughter’s little bumped nose, and yet find in her tired soul and body enough love and energy to put a pastry “A.  M.” on the top of her pie, to amuse the head of the house when he should cut into it that night.

But this mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime was not for Julia.  And just as Kennedy had adjusted herself to the life of a poor man’s wife, so Julia must adjust herself to her own so different destiny.

And adjust herself she did.  Nobody dreamed of the thoughts that went on behind the beautiful blue eyes, nobody found little Mrs. Studdiford anything but charming.  With that steadfast, serious resolution that had marked her all her life, Julia set herself to the study of gowns, of dinners, of small talk.  She kept a slim little brown Social Register on her dressing-table, and pored over it at odd moments; she listened attentively to the chatter that went on all about her.  She drew infinitely less satisfaction from the physical evidences of her success—­her beauty, her wealth, her handsome husband, and her popularity—­than any one of the women who envied her might have done, yet she did draw some satisfaction, loved her pretty gowns, the freedom of bared white neck and shoulders, the atmosphere of perfumed drawing-rooms and glittering dinner tables.  She wrote long letters to Barbara, was a devoted godmother to Theodora Carleton’s tiny son, loved to have Miss Toland with her for an occasional visit, and perhaps