Miss Julia

“ Every little girl, every old woman that he passed in the street, made him think of Julia, and when he passed a young man and woman full of concern for, and of shy pride in, their lumpy baby in its embroidered coat, a wave of divine envy swept Mark from head to foot. ”

“ I'll make you the happiest woman in the world, Julia. I love you. I'll be so proud of you! You can have a dozen girls under your wing all the time; you can answer the Queen back, and I'll never have even a thought but what you're the finest and sweetest woman in the world!"
The preposterous picture brought a shaky smile to Julia's lips and a hint of tears to her eyes. She suddenly rose from her seat and went down to the garden.
"Our talking it over does no good, Jim," she said, as he followed her, and stood looking at her and at Anna. ”

“ Yet did the countenance possess a power over Julia like that of a spell, she could not withdraw her gaze from it. The hollow cheek, the large prominent eye, with hopelessness for its sole expression, the colourless lip, the perfectly white hair, the small and still delicate, while emaciated throat, formed a picture, which could not be contemplated without extreme pain.
Julia half raising herself, exclaimed, “Where am I? where am I? oh, where am I?” each time with increasing earnestness. ”

“ Caroline, it appeared, had gone to her own family for the afternoon, and Julia, looking like a child in her short white dress and buckled slippers, was sitting in a low chair with little Anna in her arms. The room was bright with firelight and the soft light from the subdued nursery lamps, and warm russet curtains shut out the dull and dying afternoon. Dolls and blocks were scattered on the hearth rug, and Julia sat her daughter down among them, and jumped up with a radiant face to greet the newcomer. ”

“ Delicate, fair, and slender and tall beyond the middle height of woman with a waist ‘shaped to love’s wish’ and every graceful outline full of rich rounded symmetry, young Julia was a thing to dream of as the inhabitant of some far bright Elysian, rather than to behold as an inmate of the rude heartless world. ”

“ Benches were set in rows under a grove of young maple and locust trees, and Julia and Mark, sauntering well up to the front, found seats, and settled themselves to listen.
Julia, enjoying the sunshine and the good hour, looked lazily at the curiously variegated types about them: young men who lay almost horizontally in their seats, their eyes shut, newspapers blowing about their feet; toddling babies in Sunday white; young fathers and mothers with tiny coats laid across their laps; groups of middle-aged Teutons critically alert, and, everywhere, lovers and lovers and lovers. ”

“ Julia found this first experience an ordeal; she and Miss Toland were in a side pew before the big gong struck, and Julia did not raise her eyes from her book as the girls filed in. The steady rustle of frocks and shuffle of feet made her feel cold and sick.
A day or two later she could watch them, although never without profound emotion. Two hundred girls, ranging in years from ten to twenty, with roughly clipped hair, and the hideous gray-green checked aprons of the institution. Two hundred faces, sullen or vacuous, pretty, silly faces, hard faces, faces tragically hopeless and pale. ”

“ Julia found the theatricals perilously delightful; the grease paint and the ornate costume seemed like old friends; she was intoxicated and enchanted by the applause. For several days after her most successful performance she was thoughtful: what if she had never joined the "Amazon" caste, never gone to Sausalito, followed naturally in the footsteps of Connie Girard and Rose Ransome? She might have been a great actress; she would have been a great beauty. ”

“ But she's rare, Julia; it's like trying to deal with some delicate frail little lady out of Cranford, like trying to guess what Emily Bronte might like, or Eugenie de Guerin! Julia's got life sized up, she likes it—I don't know whether this conveys anything to you or not!—but she likes it as much as if it was part of a play. You don't matter to her any more; I don't; she sees things too big. She's quite extraordinary; the most extraordinary person I ever knew, I think. There's a completeness, a finish about her. She's not waiting for any self-defence from you, Jim. ”

“ He could make people, even people like these two and whom there were still other people to envy, he could make them push and snatch and scramble like that—and then remain as incapable of taking her from the hands of such patrons as of receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high note, too, of Julia's wonderful composition that, even in the long, lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her supremely proud of him. ”

“ So Julia did what was left to her, for her mother: listened patiently to long complaints, paid bills, and supplemented Jim's generous cheque with many a gold piece pressed into her mother's hand or slipped into her grandmother's dreadful old shopping-bag. She carried off her young cousins to equip them with winter suits and sensible shoes, aware all the while that their high-heeled slippers and flimsy, cheap silk dresses, the bangles that they slipped over dirty little hands, and the fancy combs they pushed into their untidy hair, were infinitely more prized by them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, as though obeying some powerful force she could not resist, Julia plunged her arms into the satin of the sleeves and brought the great soft revers up about her throat. The great, gorgeous, shimmering thing completely hid her grubby little black gown. She stepped to the mirror and stood surveying herself in a sort of ecstasy. Her cheeks glowed rose-pink against the dark fur, as she had known they would. Her lovely little head, with its coils of black hair, rose flowerlike from the clinging garment. ”

“ She wants awfully to meet you. The way it happens is too lovely—that I find you just in this place. She's coming," said Mr. Pitman—and as in all the good faith of his eagerness now; "she's coming in about three minutes."
"Coming here?"
"Yes, Julia—right here. It's where we usually meet"; and he was wreathed again, this time as if for life, in his large slow smile. "She loves this place—she's awfully keen on art. Like you, Julia, if you haven't changed—I remember how you did love art." ”

“ Julia tripped away, with a tear in her eye, a dimple in her cheek, and a light heart in her bosom. I thought it the prettiest picture of paternal and filial affection I had ever seen.
When I retired to bed, a new train of thoughts crowded into my brain. "After all," said I to myself, "it is clear this girl has a soul, though she was not moved by my eloquence. She has all the outward signs and evidences of poetic feeling. She paints well, and has an eye for nature. She is a fine musician, and enters into the very soul of song. What a pity that she knows nothing of poetry! ”

“ The faces flitted away, grinning defiance, and sending back a burst of hoarse laughter that made Julia shiver from head to foot. She drew close to the man, clinging to his garments, while he turned the heavy lock and thrust the door half open. The dim vista of a hall, with cells yawning on one side, and filled with gloomy light, through which wild, impish figures wandered restlessly to and fro, or sat motionless against the walls, met Julia's gaze. ”

“ Julia could not remove her eyes from the strange and beautiful face of this woman. Deep, but subdued agony was at work in every lineament. There was wildness in her very motion, as she lifted her superb form from the railing, and drew the folds of a cashmere shawl over her bosom, pressing her hand hard upon the rich fabric, as if to relieve some painful feeling that it covered. ”

“ Leave that to me, my son; time and circumstance will do much for us. You have chosen the flower of the Wetherals for your wife. Julia loves me, and is guided by me in every thing which relates to yourself; Lady W. is a ladylike goose, and her eldest daughter resembles the automaton in stillness and insipidity. Clara is very handsome, but I see already the germs of violence in her temper. You have done very wisely in choosing Julia; between ourselves, she is easily guided by the person she loves, and she loves me for your sake, Ennismore. ”

“ For Julia knew now that life to her must be a battle; whatever the years to come might hold for her, they could not hold more than an occasional heavenly interval of peace. Peace for Jim, peace for her mother, peace for her children and for all those whom she loved; but for herself there must be times of an increasing burden, an increasing weariness, and the gnawing of an undying fight with utter discouragement. Her secret must never be anything but a secret; and yet, to Julia, it sometimes seemed that her only happiness in life would be to shout it to the whole world. ”

“ Unlike my fair cousin, Lady Julia, her raillery never wounded: hers were the fanciful combinations which a vivid and sparkling imagination conjures up, but never the barbed and bitter arrows of sarcasm. Catching up in a second any passing absurdity, she could laugh at the scene, yet seem to spare the actor. Julia, on the contrary, with what the French call l'esprit moqueur, never felt that her wit had hit its mark till she saw her victim writhing and quivering beneath her.
There is always something in being the partner of the belle of a ball-room. ”

“ But if Julia was acting much as the average woman acts during her first hours alone in an immense and inhospitable city, which the sun refuses to shine upon, a city that knows not of her existence and cares less, she was furious with herself, even before she recovered. Where was the poise, the serenity, the grand impersonal attitude, she had learned from her subtle masters in the East? Where the full calm determination with which she had returned to take up her self-elected duties, to gratify a long latent but now full-grown ambition to build a unique pedestal for herself in the world ”

“ Julia would grin good-naturedly at this. She had no hallucinations about her mother. She knew her own value, knew she was pretty, and was glad with the simple and pathetic complacence of fourteen. Julia at eight had gone to dancing school, in the briefest skirts ever seen on a small girl, and the dirtiest white silk stockings. She had sung a shrill little song, and danced a little dance at a public benefit for the widows of three heroic firemen, when she was only nine. Her lovely mop had been crimped out of all natural wave; her youthful digestion menaced by candy and chewing gum ”

“ He would already have known, he would already have heard; her appeal, she was more and more sure, wouldn't have come to him as a revelation. He had already talked it over with her, with Miss Lindeck, to whom the Frenches, in their fortress, had never been accessible, and his whole attitude bristled, to Julia's eyes, with the betrayal of her hand, her voice, her pressure, her calculation. His tone in fact, as he talked, fairly thrust these things into her face. "But you must see her for yourself. You'll judge her. You'll love her. ”

“ As he did so the song grew sweeter and more tender than before, but he shut his ears to it and bent his head over the shell. Out of its depths arose the voice of Julia singing to him as she had sung when she gave him the shell, and though the notes sounded faint at first, they swelled louder and louder till the mist which had gathered about him was blown away.
Then he raised his head, feeling that he had been through strange places, where he could never wander anymore; and he held himself erect and strong, and looked about him. ”

“ Courteous mistress Julia, how shall I deserve this favour from you?
Julia. There is a way, master Petro, if you could find it; but the tenderness of your youth keeps you in ignorance: 'tis a great fault, I must tell you.
Pet. I shall strive to amend it, if you please to instruct me, lady.
Julia. Alas, do not you know what maids love all this while? You must come oftener amongst us; want of company keeps the spring of your blood backward. ”

“ Julia had practised almost to lassitude the art of tracing in the people who looked at her the impression promptly sequent; but it was a striking point that if, in irritation, in depression, she felt that the lighted eyes of men, stupid at their clearest, had given her pretty well all she should ever care for, she could still gather a freshness from the tribute of her own sex, still care to see her reflection in the faces of women. ”

“ With what delicious tightness she clasped my rod of Aaron, as it entered the inmost recesses of her till then virgin sanctuary. How voluptuous was the heat of her young body! I was mad with enjoyment! Her young breasts rising and falling in wild confusion attracted my caresses. Guess my state of excitement. I sucked them, and at last bit them with delight. Although Julia was much overcome with her suffering, still she reproachfully turned her lovely eyes swimming with pain and languor on me. At this instant, with a final energetic thrust, I buried myself up to the very hair in her. ”