“Never mind, she’s only ten, and there’s hope for her yet,” Captain Carey had replied cheerfully; though if he had known her a little later, in her first Beulah days, he might not have been so sanguine.  She seemed to have no instinct of adapting herself to the family life, standing just a little aloof and in an attitude of silent criticism.  She was a trig, smug prig, Nancy said, delighting in her accidental muster of three short, hard, descriptive words.  She hadn’t a bit of humor, no fun, no gayety, no generous enthusiasms that carried her too far for safety or propriety.  She brought with her to Beulah sheaves of school certificates, and when she showed them to Gilbert with their hundred per cent deportment and ninety-eight and seven-eighths per cent scholarship every month for years, he went out behind the barn and kicked its foundations savagely for several minutes.  She was a sort of continual Sunday child, with an air of church and cold dinner and sermon-reading and hymn-singing and early bed.  Nobody could fear, as for some impulsive, reckless little creature, that she would come to a bad end.  Nancy said no one could imagine her as coming to anything, not even an end!

“You never let mother hear you say these things, Nancy,” Kathleen remarked once, “but really and truly it’s just as bad to say them at all, when you know she wouldn’t approve.”

“My present object is to be as good as gold in mother’s eyes, but there I stop!” retorted Nancy cheerfully.  “Pretty soon I shall get virtuous enough to go a step further and endeavor to please the angels,—­not Julia’s cast-iron angels, but the other angels, who understand and are patient, because they remember our frames and know that being dust we are likely to be dusty once in a while.  Julia wasn’t made of dust.  She was made of—­let me see—­of skim milk and baked custard (the watery kind) and rice flour and gelatine, with a very little piece of overripe banana,—­not enough to flavor, just enough to sicken.  Stir this up with weak barley water without putting In a trace of salt, sugar, spice, or pepper, set it in a cool oven, take it out before it is done, and you will get Julia.”

Nancy was triumphant over this recipe for making Julias, only regretting that she could never show it to her mother, who, if critical, was always most appreciative.  She did send it in a letter to the Admiral, off in China, and he, being “none too good for human nature’s daily food,” enjoyed it hugely and never scolded her at all.

Julia’s only conversation at this time was on matters concerning Gladys Ferguson and the Ferguson family.  When you are washing dishes in the sink of the Yellow House in Beulah it is very irritating to hear of Gladys Ferguson’s mother-of-pearl opera glasses, her French maid, her breakfast on a tray in bed, her diamond ring, her photograph in the Sunday “Times,” her travels abroad, her proficiency in French and German.

“Don’t trot Gladys into the kitchen, for goodness’ sake, Julia!” grumbled Nancy on a warm day.  “I don’t want her diamond ring in my dishwater.  Wait till Sunday, when we go to the hotel for dinner in our best clothes, if you must talk about her.  You don’t wipe the tumblers dry, nor put them in the proper place, when your mind is full of Gladys!”