Thus, as easily almost as changing from one garment to another, Julie Rose slipped out of all her established life. With that sudden violent outcry, “What’s folks ever done for you or for me, that we got to please ’em now!” she had burst open a door, through which she and Timothy passed defiantly, finding themselves in a world where life turned round and looked at them with apparent beneficence. In the happiness of their companionship they drew long breaths of freedom; and, relaxing into the recreating power of their love, they found themselves and a confidence they had never known, so that for the first time they faced their fellow beings without fear. His concern was all for her. When he met her that first afternoon at the Richmond station, he insisted that she was tired and must have supper at once before he took her to their rooms. Accordingly, they had their first meal together in the station restaurant, a meal that in spite of the city heat and the coming and going of hurried people, was to Julie the most wonderful she had ever eaten. Afterward they boarded a westbound street-car. “I’m afraid you’re going to find the city mighty hot after the mountains,” he said anxiously. She did not answer, but she turned and looked at him, and words were not necessary. What did heat or material discomfort matter to her then? The city was hot, tired, and flat after long weeks of summer; disheveled and overgrown with extra population also, as were most cities near any of the big training-camps, in that war year of 1918. “The rooms ain’t much, honey,” he apologized, as the car ground its way west with jerks of stops and starts. “An’ they ain’t in a swell part of town; but they’re the best I could do, an’--an’ I got something to show you.” The rooms were in a part of the city made up almost entirely of blocks of small frame houses, sheltering Richmond’s poorer inhabitants, who spilled out of their front doors on to the little porches and into the streets: the men in shirt sleeves, the women sometimes tidied for the afternoons, sometimes still in the depression of wrappers that had been worn through all the heat of the day. “You see it ain’t much--pretty hot, an’ cheap out this way,” he apologized again as they got off the car and started along the street. She looked up at him as she had looked before. “Oh, Tim!” she cried; and suddenly she laughed--a ripple of shy wild ecstasy. “Oh, Tim, honey! How could anything like that matter now?” Looking at her, he caught the flaming happiness of her face, and laughed too. “I know, I know,” he whispered. “An’ anyhow, I have got something fine to show you,” he added.