"Don't delude yourself. You would not be the least bit of a cow-boy. You wouldn't even look picturesque--if you did you might be sorry. You would just be a plain northern California rancher. Of course you would have all the riding you wanted, but there are no round-ups worth speaking of on a ranch the size of Lumalitas. And probably you would continue to let sections of it to men that wanted to raise cattle or horses on a small scale. You had better devote yourself to the dairy and to raising hay and grain, and turn about five hundred acres into a chicken-ranch--nothing pays like that." He threw back his head and laughed as heartily as if death and disaster had never been. "From the English hustings and the greatest parliamentary body the world has ever known to chickens and butter in California! From Capheaton to Rosewater, oil-skin overalls and a linen 'Duster!' Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! But give me a comprehensive idea of the place, in your own inimitable unvarnished diction. That will keep the ghosts off, at all events." XVIII Julia Kaye was one of those women designed by nature for the role of a Valerie Marneffe, or of that astute Parisian's bourgeoise and more romantic daughter, Emma Bovary; but tossed, in the gamble of the fates, into a setting of respectable opulence, where her instincts for prey were trimmed of their crudities, and the vehemence of her passions subdued by the opportunity to gratify all other whims and desires. Her father, born in the sooty alley of a manufacturing town in the north of England, had run away to sea in his boyhood, deserted in the port of New York, starved, stolen, peddled, washed dishes in cheap restaurants, shovelled snow, tramped to Chicago, starved and peddled and shovelled again, finally found a position with a firm of wholesale druggists. He attended a night school, proved himself a lad of uncommon sharpness, and in less than a year was first packing and then dispensing drugs. Five years later he was drawing a large salary, and at the age of thirty he had opened a retail drug store of his own.