went to the “Tivoli” or “Morosco’s,” or even the Baldwin Theatre, and sometimes bought and carried home the materials for a dinner, and invited a few of George’s men friends to enjoy it with them.  These were happy times; Emeline, flushed and pretty in her improvised apron, queened it over the three or four adoring males, and wondered why other women fussed so long over cooking, when men so obviously enjoyed a steak, baked potatoes, canned vegetables, and a pie from Swain’s.  After dinner the men always played poker, a mild little game at first, with Emeline eagerly guarding a little pile of chips, and gasping over every hand like a happy child; but later more seriously, when Emeline, contrary to poker superstition, sat on the arm of her husband’s chair, to bring him luck.

Luck she certainly seemed to bring him; the Pages would go yawning to bed, after one of these evenings, chuckling over the various hands.

“I couldn’t see what you drew, George,” Emeline would say, “but I could see that Mack had aces on the roof, and it made me crazy to have you go on raising that way!  And then your three fish hooks!”

George would shout with pride at her use of poker terms—­would laugh all the harder if she used them incorrectly.  And sometimes, sinking luxuriously into the depths of the curly-maple bed, Emeline would think herself the luckiest woman in the world.  No hurry about getting up in the morning; no one to please but herself; pretty gowns and an adoring husband and a home beyond her maddest hopes—­the girl’s dreams no longer followed her, happy reality had blotted out the dream.

She felt a little injured, a little frightened, when the day came on which she must tell George of some pretty well-founded suspicions of her own condition.  George might be “mad,” or he might laugh.

But George was wonderfully soothing and reassuring; more, was pathetically glad and proud.  He petted Emeline into a sort of reluctant joy, and the attitude of her mother and sisters and the few women she knew was likewise flattering.  Important, self-absorbed, she waited her appointed days, and in the early winter a wizened, mottled little daughter was born.  Julia was the name Emeline had chosen for a girl, and Julia was the name duly given her by the radiant and ecstatic George in the very first hour of her life.  Emeline had lost interest in the name—­indeed, in the child and her father as well—­just then; racked, bewildered, wholly spent, she lay back in the curly-maple bed, the first little seed of that general resentment against life that was eventually to envelop her, forming in her mind.

They had told her that because of this or that she would not have a “hard time,” and she had had a very hard time.  They had told her that she would forget the cruel pain the instant it was over, and she knew she never would forget it.  It made her shudder weakly to think of all the babies in the world—­of the schools packed with children—­at what a cost!