Through the months of waiting Juliette longed for a boy. It seemed to her somehow essential for the retention of Henry's love that she should give him a boy; she could scarcely bear another girl, she who had brought into the world six girls. Much of Juliette's pride during those months was softened by her longing; she began once more to frequent the company of her neighbors in her zest for the least scrap of information that would help the fulfilment of it. There was no fantastic concoction she would not drink, nor any omen she would not propitiate. Half the saints in the calendar were introduced to her by ladies that knew them and vouched for the interest they would take in her pregnancy. Juliette never confided to anybody her reason for wanting a boy; and nobody suspected it, since half a dozen girls were enough to explain any woman's desire for a change. One adviser discovered in a tattered volume of obstetrical theory that when the woman was older than the man the odds were on a male child. Juliette's researches to gather confirmation of this remark led her into discussions about unequal marriages; and as the time of her confinement drew near she became gentler and almost anxious to discuss her love for Henry Snow, so much gentler and less reserved that those who had formerly whispered loudest and most falsely to one another now whispered sympathetically to her. On the day before Juliette's confinement her husband came in from work very irritable. "Here, when's this baby going to be born? I'm getting a bit annoyed. The men at the office are betting on its being a boy. It makes me look a fool, you know, that sort of thing." She clutched his arm. "Which do you want, Henri? Tell me, _mon amour, mon homme_." "I don't care which it is, as long as you're quick about it and this betting stops." That night she was delivered of a girl, and because it was his she choked down the wild disappointment and loved Sylvia the best of all her seven girls. SYLVIA SCARLETT =Sylvia Scarlett= CHAPTER I