“Miss Summerhayes! why did you laugh as we came upstairs?” “Oh!” said Janet, quite restored from that momentary impression. “I don’t know. Because it is curious to come into the middle of a story; it is like beginning a book, as you do sometimes, at the third volume. One wonders what has happened before, as well as what is going to happen now.” “You think that’s a story!” cried Julia, with scorn; “because Gussy’s a fool, and that man--I can’t endure that man.” “You make that too easy for anyone to see. I think you made a sound like what they do in the theatre.” “I hissed him,” said Julia, her lowering eyebrows closing down over her eyes. “I always do. He can’t bear to be hissed. He is just like an actor: it makes him mad, and that is why I do it, and I always shall. I don’t care what anyone says.” “That is a pity,” said Janet; “for it will not harm him, but you. You forget that people care very little for the opinion of a girl at your age, especially when it is rudely expressed.” “They don’t care much for your opinion,” said Julia, furiously. “No; I did not expect it; and I have no opinion, except that you must learn to be a gentlewoman--if that can be learnt--or else I must go away.” Julia received this, as she usually did Janet’s remonstrances, with a look of rage, a flush of shame, and then a sudden self-subdual. “You want to go away,” she said. “You are the only nice one that has ever been here; and you want to go and leave me. I know you do. You’ll go before Dolff comes home, and then he’ll never know you, and will think--will just think I am a stupid and don’t know anything, as they all do!” “Well, my dear child,” said Janet, who understood this broken speech perfectly well, and knew that she was being represented to “Dolff” in the brightest colors, a thing by no means indifferent to her, “they are not very far wrong if they think so; for a girl who hisses--even in the theatre----” “I did once,” cried Julia, “in the theatre! They had a hideous ballet in the pantomime like what one reads of in books--a woman making a show of herself--oh!” The girl’s cheeks blazed crimson at the thought. “And I hissed--like this.” Here Julia uttered a sound, in comparison with which a whole serpent-house in highest exasperation would have retired defeated, with the whole force of her youthful energy and breath. “Gussy pinched me black and blue to stop me, and I wouldn’t. They never would take me to the theatre again.” “I don’t wonder,” said Janet “So now you hiss the people who come to call.”