George laughed at it all; it sounded very funny to him, coming from this very small person, with her round, serious eyes, and her mop of gold.  He asked her what she wanted him to bring her next time he came home, and Julia said black boots with white tops and tassels, and made him laugh again.

Thus early did Julia act as a mediator between her parents, but of this particular occasion she had no recollection, nor of much that followed it.  Had she been a few years older she might really have affected a lasting reconciliation between them, for all that was best in George made him love his daughter, and Emeline was intensely proud of the child.  As it was, Julia was too young.  She might unconsciously be the means of reuniting them now and then, but she could not at all grasp the situation, and when she was not quite seven a decree of divorce, on the ground of desertion, set both Emeline and George free, after eight years of married life.

Emeline was too frightened at the enormity of the thing to be either glad or sorry.  She had never meant to go so far.  She had threatened George with divorce just as George had threatened her, in the heat of anger, practically since her wedding day.  But the emotion that finally drove Emeline to a lawyer was not anger, it was just dull rebellion against the gray, monotonous level of her days.  She was alone when George was away on trips; she was not less alone when he was in town.  He had formed the habit of joining “the boys” in the evening; he was surly and noncommittal with his wife, but Julia, hanging about the lower hall door or playing with children in the street, always heard a burst of laughter as he joined his friends; everybody in the world—­except Emeline—­liked George!

Poor Emeline—­she could easily have held him!  A little tenderness toward him, a little interest in her home and her child, and George would have been won again.  Had he but once come home to a contented wife and a clean house, George’s wavering affection would have been regained.  But Emeline was a loud-mouthed, assertive woman now, noisily set upon her own way, and filled with a sense of her own wrongs.  She had discussed George too often with her friends to feel any possible interest in him except as a means of procuring sympathy.  George bored her now; as a matter of fact, Emeline had almost decided that she would prefer alimony to George.

Goaded on by Mrs. Povey, and a young Mrs. Sunius, affectionately known as Maybelle, Emeline went to see a lawyer.  The lawyer surprised her by his considerate brevity.  Getting a divorce was a very simple affair, much better done than not.  There were ways to make a man pay his alimony regularly, and the little girl would stay with her mother, of course; at her age no other solution was possible.  Emeline felt that she must know how much expense she would be put to, and was gratified to find that it would cost her not more than fifty dollars.  The lawyer asked her how soon she could get hold of her husband.