“I knew her when she was Julia Cairn,” he told him. “She is of old New England stock, but her parents had so little sense of fitness as to permit her to be born in Omaha, where they had settled. She’s been married only three years, you know. From private school in New York, she went to Paris. No--she did not study there. She has never studied, that I know of. After Paris, she returned to Omaha! Actually! And stood it two years. By then, she had been made president of so many women’s clubs and circles, forcibly--you know her opinion of such truck--that she escaped to an aunt in Bangor, Maine. From cellar to refrigerator. Next, she came to New York and began to work.” “I thought you said she had never studied.” “She never did. But she worked. She got a job as teacher of English in the private school which she had graduated from, five years before. Without a degree, without anything very much, except her power to get anything she desires. Her knowledge in English literature is rather rudimentary. But she had read tremendously in French and Spanish and Italian.” “Why, then, didn’t she get a job in one of these languages?” asked Quincy. “I don’t know. Except that Julia Cairn never did what was expected, any more than does Julia Deering now. It was down there I heard of her and met her--at a silly tea, which she veined with gold. A friend of mine, Betty Robinson, used to tell me about their amazing lectures in English literature, delivered by a Miss Cairn. It seems her course was devoted to a systematic proof of the inferiority of English letters to the French. Think of it! In a respectable private school. And her adoring principal never minded. While the girls in their French course were reading Erckmann-Chatrian, Halèvy, Ohnet and other fourth-rate writers, she, in the English department, made them acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, Zola and Stendhal, so that they might see for themselves how unutterably second-rate were Eliot and Thackeray. She made them read the Englishmen. But she made them love the real European literatures. In that way, she justified teaching what she had often told me she deemed a language that has been ‘decadent since the time of Swift.’ Lead up to these things, yourself. She’ll tell you.” “And what happened then?” Quincy was not interested in a decadent literature. “She taught in that one school until the principal, Doctor Tomley, went and died. She was twenty-six, then, at least. Although I’m not sure of her age.” “Did she lose her job or leave it?”