Not always, for there were, of course, serene long stretches of happiness, confident times in which she was really what she seemed to be, only beautiful, young, exceptionally fortunate and beloved.  But it was into these very placid intervals that the word or look would enter, to bring her house of cards crashing about her head once more.

Sometimes, not often, it was a mere casual acquaintance whose chance remark set the old, old wound to throbbing; or sometimes it was Barbara’s or Miss Toland’s praise:  “You’re so sweet and fine, Ju—­if only we’d all done with our opportunities as you have!” Oftener it was Jim’s voice that consciously or unconsciously on his part stabbed Julia to the very soul.  For him, the sting was gone, because, at the first prick, Julia was there to take it and bear it.  No need to conceal from her now the bitterness of his moods; she would meet him halfway.  He was worrying about that old affair?  Ah, he mustn’t do that—­here were Julia’s arms about him, her lovely face close to his, her sweet and earnest sympathy ready to probe bravely into his darkest thought, and find him some balm.  Still gowned from a ball, perhaps, jewelled, perfumed, dragging her satin train after her, she would come straight into his arms, with:  “Something’s worrying you, dearest, tell me what it is?  I love you so—–­”

No resentment on Jim’s part could live for a moment in this atmosphere.  He only wanted to tell her about it, to be soothed like a small boy, to catch his beautiful wife in his arms, and win from her lips again and again the assurance that she loved him and him alone.  What these scenes cost Julia’s own fine sense of delicacy and dignity, only Julia knew.  They left her with a vague feeling of shame, a consciousness of compromise.  For a day or two after such an episode a new hesitancy would mark her manner, a certain lack of confidence lend pathos to the sweetness of her voice.

But no outside influence ever could bring home to her the realization of the shadow on her life as forcibly as did her own inner musings, the testimony of her own soul.  If she had but been innocent, how easy to bear Jim’s scorn, or the scorn of the whole world!  It was the bitter knowledge that she had taken her life in her own hands nearly twenty years ago, and wrecked it more surely than if she had torn out her own eyes, that made her heart sick within her now.  She, who loved dignity, who loved purity, who loved strength, must carry to her grave the knowledge of her own detestable weakness!  She must instruct her daughter, guarding the blue eyes and the active mind from even the knowledge of life’s ugly side, she must hold the highest standard of purity before her son, knowing, as she knew, that far back at her life’s beginning, were those few hideous weeks that, in the eyes of the world, could utterly undo the work of twenty strong and steadfast years!  She must be silent when she longed to cry aloud, she must train herself to cry aloud at the thing that