The Story of Julia Page Part 31

A clear light was s.h.i.+ning in Julia's eyes. Now, as she automatically arranged the tea things before her, and poured him his first cup of tea, she said:

"Jim, I told you that I haven't thought much about marriage for myself.

I suppose it's funny that I shouldn't, for they say most girls do! But perhaps it was because the biographies and histories I began to read when I came to the settlement house were all about men: how Lincoln rose, how Napoleon rose, how this rich man sold newspapers when he was a little boy, and that other one spent his first money in taking his mother out of the poorhouse. And of course marriage doesn't enter so much into the lives of men. It came to me years ago that what wise men are trying to din into young people everywhere is just this: that if you make yourself ready for anything, that thing will come to you. Just do your end, and somewhere out in the queer, big, incomprehensible machinery of the world your place will mysteriously begin to get ready for you--Am I talking sense, Jim?"

"Absolutely. Go on!" said Jim.

"Well, and so I thought that if I took years and years I might--well, you won't see why, but I wanted to be a lady!" confessed Julia, her lips smiling, but with serious eyes. "And, Jim, everything comes so much more easily than one thinks. Your aunt knew I wasn't, but I happened to be what she needed, and I kept quiet, and listened and learned!"

"And suppose you _hadn't_ happened upon the settlement house?" asked Jim, his ardent eyes never moving from her face.

"Why, I would have done it somehow, some other way. I meant to take a position in some family, and perhaps be a trained nurse when I was older, or study to be a librarian and take the City Hall examinations, or work up to a post-office position! I had lots of plans, only of course I was only a selfish little girl then, and I thought I would disappear, and never let my own people hear from me again!"

"But you softened on that point, eh?" asked Jim.

"Oh, right away!" Julia's wonderful eyes shone upon him with something unearthly in their light. "Because G.o.d decides to whom we shall belong, Jim," said she, with childish faith, "and to start wrong with my own people would mean that I was all wrong, everywhere. But my highest ambition then was to grow, as the years went on, to be useful to nice people, and to be liked by them. I never dreamed every one would be so friendly! And when Miss Pierce and Miss Scott have asked me to their homes, and when Mrs. Forbes took me to Santa Cruz, and Mrs. Chetwynde asked me to dine with them, well, I can't tell you what it meant!"

"It meant that you are as good--and better, in every way--than all the rest of them put together!" said the prejudiced Jim.

"Oh, Jim!" Julia looked at him over her teacup, a breach of manners which Jim thought very charming. "No," she said, presently, pursuing her own thoughts, "but I never thought of marriage! And now you come along, Jim, so--so good to me, so infinitely dear, and I can't--I can't help caring--" And suddenly her lip trembled, and tears filled her eyes. She looked down at her teacup, and stirred it blindly.

"You angel!" Jim said.

"Don't--make--me--cry--!" Julia begged thickly. A second later she looked up and laughed through tears. "And I feel like a person who has been skipped over four or five grades at school; I don't know whether I _can_ be a rich man's wife!" she said whimsically. "I know I can go on as I am, reading and thinking, and listening to other people, and keeping quiet when I have nothing to say, but--but when I think of being Mrs.

James Studdiford--"

"Oh, I love to hear you say it!" Jim leaned across the table, and put one warm big hand over hers. "My darling little wife!"

The word dyed Julia's cheeks crimson, and for the long hour that they lingered over their tea she seemed to Jim more charming than he had ever found her before. Her gravity, with its deep hint of suppressed mirth, and her mirth that was always so delicate and demure, so shot with sudden pathos and seriousness, were equally exquisite; and her beauty won all eyes, from the old waiter who hovered over their happiness, to the little baby in the street car who would sit in Julia's lap and nowhere else. Jim presently left Julia to her Girls' Club, consoling himself with the thought that on the following night they were to make their first trip to the theatre together.

But when, at half-past seven the next evening, Jim presented himself at the settlement house, he found Julia alone, and obviously not dressed for the theatre. She admitted him with a kiss that to his lover's enthusiasm was strangely cool, and drew him into the reception hall.

"Your aunt had to go out with Miss Parker," said Julia. "But she'll positively be here a little after eight."

"My darling, I didn't come to see Aunt Sanna!" Jim caught her to him.

"But, sweetheart," he said, "how hot your face is, and your poor little hands are icy! Aren't you well?"

"No, I don't believe I'm very well!" Julia admitted restlessly, lighting the shaded lamp on the centre table, and snapping off the side lights that so mercilessly revealed her pale face and burning eyes.

"Not well enough for the theatre? Well, but darling, I don't care one snap for the theatre," Jim a.s.sured her eagerly. "Only I hate to see you so nervous and tired. Has it been a hard day? Aunt Sanna--?"

"No, your aunt's an angel to me--no, it's been an easy day," Julia said, dropping into a chair, and pus.h.i.+ng her hair back from her face with a feverish gesture. A second later she sprang up and disappeared into the a.s.sembly hall. "I thought I mightn't have locked the door," she said, returning.

"Why, sweetheart," Jim said, in great distress, "what is it? You're not one bit like yourself!"

"No, I know I'm not," Julia said wildly. She sat down again. "I've been thinking and thinking all day, until I feel as if I must go _crazy_!" she said with a desperate gesture. "And it's come to this, Jim--Don't think I'm excited--I mean it. I--we can't be married, Jim. That's all.

Don't--don't look so amazed. People break engagements all the time, don't they? And we aren't really engaged, Jim; n.o.body knows it. And--and so it's _all_ right!"

Anything less right than Julia's ashen face and blazing eyes, and the touch of her cold wet little hands, Jim thought he had never seen. He stepped into the bathroom, and ran his eye along the trim row of labelled bottles on the shelf.

"Here, drink this, dear," he said, coming back to her with something clear and pungent in a gla.s.s. "Now, come here," and half lifting the little figure in his arms he put her on the couch, and tucked a plaid warmly about her. "Don't forget that your husband is also a doctor,"

said Jim, sitting down so that he could see her face, and hold one hand in both of his. "You're all worn out and excited, and no wonder! You see, most girls take out their excess emotion on their families, but my little old girl is too much alone!"

Julia's eyes were fixed on him as if she were powerless to draw them away. It was sweet--it was poignantly sweet--to be cared for by him, to feel that Jim's warm heart and keen mind were at her service, that the swift smile was for her, the ardour in his eyes was all her own. For perhaps half an hour she rested, almost without speaking, and Jim talked to her with studied lightness and carelessness. Then suddenly she sat up, and put her hands to her loosened hair.

"I must look wild, Jim!"

"You look like a ravis.h.i.+ng little gipsy! But I wish you had more colour, mouse!"

"Am I pale?" Julia asked, with a little nervous laugh. Jim dropped on one knee beside her, and studied her with anxious eyes, and she pushed the hair off his forehead, and rested her cheek against it with a long sigh as if she were very tired.

"What is it, dear?" asked Jim, with infinite solicitude.

"Well!" Julia put the faintest shadow of a kiss on his forehead, then got abruptly to her feet and crossed the room, as if she found his nearness suddenly insufferable. "I can't break my engagement to you this way, Jim," said she. "For even if I told you a thousand times that I had stopped loving you"--a spasm of pain crossed her face, she shut her hands tightly together over her heart--"even then you would know that I love you with my whole soul," she said in a whisper with shut eyes. "But you see," and Julia turned a pitiful smile upon him, "you see there's something you don't understand, Jim! You say I have climbed up alone, from being a tough little would-be actress, who lived over a saloon in O'Farrell Street, to this! You say--and your aunt says--that I am wise, wise to see what is worth having, and to work for it! But has it never occurred to _one_ of you--" Julia's voice, which had been rising steadily, sank to a cold, low tone. "No," she said, as if to herself, sitting down at the table, and resting her arms upon it. "No, it has never occurred to one of them to ask _why_ I am different--to ask just what made me so!

Life boils itself down to this, doesn't it?" she went on, staring drearily at the shadowy corner of the room beyond her. "That women have something to sell, or give away, and the question is just how much each one can get for it! That's what makes the most insignificant married woman feel superior to the happiest and richest old maid. She says to herself, 'I've made my market. Somebody chose me!' That's what motherhood and homemaking rest on: the whole world is just one great big question of s.e.x, spinning away in s.p.a.ce! And even after a woman is married, she still plays with s.e.x; she likes to feel that men admire her, doesn't she? At dinners there must be a man for every woman; at dances no two girls must dance together! And here, the minute a new girl comes to join my clubs, I try to read her face. Is she pure, or has she already thrown away--"

"Julia, _dear_!" said Jim, amazed and troubled, but she silenced him with a quick gesture. Her cheeks were burning now, and her words came fast.

"Those poor little girls at St. Anne's," she said feverishly, "they've thrown their lives away because this thing that is in the air all about them came too close. They were too young legally to be trusted as Nature has trusted them for years! They heard people talk of it, and laugh about it--it didn't _seem_ very dangerous--"

"Julia!" Jim said again, pleadingly.

"Just one moment, Jim, and I'll be done! When they had learned their lesson, when they had found out what sorrow it brought, when they knew that there was only loss and shame in it for them--then it was too late!

Then men, and women, too, expected them to go on giving; there was nothing else to do. Oh," said Julia, in a heartbreaking voice, bringing her locked hands down upon the table as if she were in physical agony, "if the law would only take a hand before and not afterward! Or if, when they are sick to death of men, they could believe that time would wash it all away; that there was clean, good work for them somewhere in the world!"

"My darling, why distress yourself about what can't possibly concern you?" Jim said. Julia stared at him thoughtfully for a few silent seconds.

"It _does_ concern me. That's how I bought my wisdom," she said quietly then, with no emotion deeper than a mild regret visible in her face.

Voice and manner were swept bare of pa.s.sion; she seemed infinitely fatigued. "That's why I can't marry you, Jim."

"What do you mean?" Jim said easily, uncomprehendingly, the indulgent smile hardly stricken from his lips.

Julia's eyes met his squarely across the lamplight.

"That," she said simply.

There was a silence, and no change of expression on either face. Then Jim stood up.

"I don't believe it!" he said, with a short laugh.

"It's true," said Julia. "I was not fifteen. How long ago it was! n.o.body has ever known--you need not have known. But I am glad I told you. I have been thinking of nothing else but telling you for two days and two nights. And sometimes I would say to myself that what that old little ignorant Julia did would not concern you--"

Jim made an inarticulate sound, from where he sat with his elbows on his knees, with his face dropped in his hands.

"But I see it does concern you!" Julia said, quickly, with great simplicity. "I--luckily I decided to tell you this morning," she said, "for I am absolutely exhausted now. It was a terrible thing to keep thinking about, and I could not have fought it out any longer! There were extenuating circ.u.mstances, I suppose. I was a spoiled little empty-headed girl; the girls all about me were reckless in everyway; I did not know the boundary-line, or dream that it mattered very much, so long as no one knew! My mother had been unhappy in my childhood, and used to talk a good deal about the disappointment of marriage. Perhaps I don't make myself clear?"

"_You_! Julia!" Jim whispered, his hands still over his face.

"Yes, I know," Julia said drearily. "I don't seem like that sort of a girl, I know."