During the ensuing fortnight there were two or three more rehearsals of “The Amazons” at the Grand Opera House, which only confirmed Julia’s first impression of her fellow-players.  The men she liked, and flirted with; for the girls she had a supreme contempt.  She found herself younger, prettier, and a better actress than the youngest, prettiest, and cleverest among them.  While these pampered daughters of wealth went awkwardly through their parts, and chatted in subdued tones among themselves, Julia rattled her speeches off easily, laughed and talked with all the young men in turn, posed and pirouetted as one born to the footlights.  If Julia fancied that any girl was betraying a preference for any particular man, against that man she directed the full battery of her charms.  Carter Hazzard came to every rehearsal, and was quite openly her slave.  He did not offer to walk home with her again, but Julia knew that he was conscious of her presence whenever she was near him, and spun a mad little dream about a future in which she queened it over all these girls as his wife.

It was all delightful and exciting.  Life had never been dark to Julia; now she found the days all too short for her various occupations and pleasures.  Mark was assuming more and more the attitude of a lover, and Julia was too much of a coquette to discourage him utterly.  She really liked him, and loved the stolen hours in Pomeroy and Parke’s big piano house, when Mark, flinging his hair out of his eyes, played like an angel, and Julia nibbled caramels and sat curled up on the davenport, watching him.  And through the casual attentions of other men, the occasional flattering half-hours with Carter Hazzard, the evenings of gossip at Mrs. Tarbury’s, and round the long table at Montiverte’s, Julia liked to sometimes think of Mark; his admiration was a little warm, reassuring background for all the other thoughts of the day.

At the end of the fourth or fifth rehearsal Julia noticed that pretty Barbara Toland was trying to manage a moment’s speech with her alone.  She amused herself with an attempt to avoid Miss Toland just from pure mischief, but eventually the two came face to face, in a garishly lighted bit of passage, Barbara, for all her advantage in years and in position, seeming the younger of the two.

“Oh, Miss Page,” said Barbara nervously, “I wanted to—­but were you going somewhere?”

“Don’t matter if I was!” said Julia, airily gracious, but watching shrewdly.

“Well, I—­I hope you won’t think this is funny, but, well, I’ll tell you,” stammered Barbara, very red.  “I know you don’t know us all very well, you know—­it’s different with us—­we’ve all been brought up together—­but I didn’t know whether you knew—­perhaps you did—­that Carter Hazzard is married?”

Julia felt stunned, and a little sick.  She got only the meaning of the words, their value would come later.  But with a desperate effort she pulled herself together, and smiled with dry lips.