There, at that hour, she came to that second birth all women know; she was born into that world of drifting sweet odours, blending and iridescent colours, evasive and enchanting sounds, that is the kingdom of the heart.  Julia did not know why, from this hour on, she was no longer a little girl, she was no longer dumb and blind and unseeing.  But a new and delightful consciousness woke within her, a new sense of her own importance, her own charm.

When she and Connie strolled out again, it was, for Julia at least, into a changed world.  The immortal hour of romance touched even sordid Mission Street with gold.  Julia walked demurely, but conscious of every admiring glance she won from the passers-by, conscious of a score of swallows taking flight from a curb, conscious of the pathetic beauty of the little draggled mother wheeling home her sleepy baby, the setting sunlight glittering in the eyes of both.

“He’s nothing but a big spoiled kid, if you want to know what I think,” said Connie, ending a long dissertation to which Julia had only half listened.

“He—­who?” asked Julia, suddenly recalled from dreams, and feeling her heart turn liquid within her.  A weakness seized her knees, a delicious chill ran up her spine.

“Hazzard—­the smarty!” Connie elucidated carelessly.

“Oh, sure!” Julia said heavily.  She made no further comment.

She and Connie wandered in and out of a few shops, asking prices, and fingering laces and collars.  They went into the dim, echoing old library on Post Street, to powder their noses at the mirror downstairs; they went into the music store at Sutter and Kearney, and listened for a few moments to a phonograph concert; they bought violets—­ten cents for a great bunch—­at the curb market about Lotta’s fountain.

The sweetness of the dying spring day flooded the city, and its very essence pierced Julia’s heart with a vague pain that was a pleasure, too.  Presently she and Connie walked to California Street, and climbed a steep block or two to the Maison Montiverte.

Julia and her mother, and a large proportion of their acquaintances, dined chez Montiverte perhaps a hundred times a year.  There was a regular twenty-five-cent dinner that was extremely good, there was a fifty-cent dinner fit for a king, and there were specialties de la maison, as, for example, a combination salad at twenty cents that was a meal in itself.  Irrespective of the other order, the guest of the Maison Montiverte was regaled with boiled shrimps or crabs’ legs while he waited for his dinner, was eagerly served with all the delicious French bread and butter that he could eat, and had a little cup of superb black coffee without charge to finish his meal.  Brilliant piano music swept the rooms whenever any guest cared to send the waiter with a five-cent piece to the old mechanical piano, and sprightly conversation, carried on from table to table, gave the place that tone that