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“Well! What an unspoiled modest little soul you are, Julie!” interrupted the doctor’s admiring voice. He wheeled away the umbrella and, lying luxuriously on his elbows in the sun, beamed at them both through his glasses.

“Jim,” said the actress, severely, “it’s positively indecent–the habit you’re getting of evesdropping on Ann and me!”

“It gives me sidelights on your characters,” said the doctor, quite brazenly.

“Ann–don’t you call that disgraceful?”

“I certainly do, Ju,” his wife agreed warmly. “But Jim has no sense of honor.” Ann Arbuthnot, in the fifteen years of her married life, had never been able to keep a thrill of adoration out of her voice when she spoke, however jestingly, of her husband. It trembled there now.

“Well, what’s wrong, Julie? Some old admirer turn up?” asked the doctor, sleepily content to follow any conversational lead, in the idle pleasantness of the hour.

“No–no!” she corrected him, “just some silly social complications ahead–which I hate!”

“Be rude,” suggested the doctor, pleasantly.

“Now, you know, I’d love that!” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, youthfully. “I’d simply love to be followed and envied and adored!”

“No, you wouldn’t, Ann!” Miss Ives assured her promptly. “You’d like it, as I did, for a little while. And then the utter USELESSNESS of it would strike you. Especially from such little complacent, fluffy whirlings as that Dancing Girl!”

“Yes, and that’s the kind of a girl I like,” persisted the other, smiling.

“That’s the kind of a girl you WERE, Ann, I’ve no doubt,” said the actress, vivaciously, “only sweeter. I know she wore white ruffles and a velvet band on her hair, didn’t she, Jim? And roses in her belt?”

“She did,” said the doctor, reminiscently. “I believe she flirted in her kindergarten days. She was always engaged to ride or dance or row on the river with the other men–and always splitting her dances, and forgetting her promises, and wearing the rings and pins of her adorers.”

“And the fun was, Ju,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, girlishly, with bright color in her cheeks, “that when Jim came there to give two lectures, you know, all the older girls were crazy about him–and he was ten years older than I, you know, and I never DREAMED–“

“Oh, you go to, Ann! You never DREAMED!” said Miss Ives, lazily.

“Honestly, I didn’t!” Mrs. Arbuthnot protested. “I remember my brother Billy saying, ‘Babs, you don’t think Dr. Arbuthnot is coming here to see ME, do you?’ and then it all came over me! Why, I was only eighteen.”

“And engaged to Billy’s chum,” said the doctor.

“Well,” said the wife, naively, “he knew all along it wasn’t serious.”

“You must have been a rose,” said Miss Ives, “and I would have hated you! Now, when I went to dances,” she pursued half seriously, “I sat in one place and smiled fixedly, and watched the other girls dance. Or I talked with great animation to the chaperons. Ann, I’ve felt sometimes that I would gladly die, to have the boys crowd around me just once, and grab my card and scribble their names all over it. I didn’t dress very well, or dance very well–and I never could talk to boys.” She began to trace a little watercourse in the sand with an exquisite finger tip. “I was the most unhappy girl on earth, I think! I felt every birthday was a separate insult–twenty, and twenty-two, and twenty-four! We were poor, and life was–oh, not dramatic or big!–but just petty and sordid. I used to rage because the dining-room was the only place for the sewing-machine, and rage because my bedroom was really a back parlor. Well!–I joined a theatrical company–came away. And many a night, tired out and discouraged, I’ve cried myself to sleep because I’d never have any girlhood again!”

She stopped with a half-apologetic laugh. The doctor was watching her with absorbed, bright eyes. Mrs. Arbuthnot, unable to imagine youth without joy and beauty, protested:

“Julie–I don’t believe you–you’re exaggerating! Do you mean you didn’t go on the stage until you were twenty-four!”