Julia watched them with a sudden, new, and almost terrifying distaste growing in her heart.  How dirty and shiftless and common--yes, common—­these girls were!  Julia felt sick with the force of the revelation.  She saw Connie lace her shabby pink-brocade corset together with a black shoestring; she saw Rose close with white thread a great hole in the heel of a black silk stocking.  Their crimped hair nauseated her, their rouge and powder and cologne.  She could hardly listen in patience to their careless and sometimes coarse chatter.

And when they were gone she still lay there, thinking—­thinking—­ thinking!  The sunlight crept lower and lower over the room’s disorder; its last bright triangle was gone, twilight came, and the soft early darkness.

Mrs. Tarbury presently called Julia, in mellifluous accents, and the girl pulled herself stiffly from the bed, and went blinking down to an improvised supper.  They two were alone in the big house, and fell into intimate conversation over their sardines and coffee and jam, discussing the characters of every person in the house with much attention to trivial detail.  At nine o’clock some friends came in to see Mrs. Tarbury, and Julia went upstairs again.

She lighted the bedroom, and began idly to fold and straighten the clothes that were strewn about everywhere.  But she very speedily gave up the task:  there were no closets to hang things in, and many things were too torn or dirty to be hung up, anyway!  Julia went down one flight of stairs to the nearest bathroom, in search of hot water, but both faucets ran cold, and she went upstairs again.  She hunted through Connie’s bureau and Rose’s for a fresh nightgown, but not finding one, had to put on the limp and torn garment one of the girls had loaned her a week or two before.

Now she sat down on the edge of her bed, vaguely discouraged.  Tears came to her eyes, she did not quite know why.  She opened a novel, and composed herself to read, but could not become interested, and finally pushed up the window the two inches that the girls approved, turned out the lights, and jumped into bed.  She would want her beauty sleep for “The Amazons” to-morrow night.  Julia had been fully determined, when she got home, to abandon the amateur company, to fail them at the very hour of their performance, but a casual word from Connie had caused her to change her mind.

“Don’t you be a fool and get in Dutch with Artheris!” Connie had said, and upon sober reflection Julia had found the advice good.

But she got no beauty sleep that night.  She lay hour after hour wakeful and wretched, the jumbled memories of the last twenty-four hours slipping through her mind in ceaseless review:  the green, swift-rushing water, with gulls flying over it; the coffee pot reflecting a dozen joyous young faces; the garden bright with roses—­

And then, with sickening regularity, the clubhouse and the girls’ voices—­