Julia always
wore her uniform to these dances, but she also danced, when asked, and
never attempted to deny that she enjoyed herself. But that there was an
immense gulf already widening between her and these other girls, one of
whom she might have been, she soon began to perceive. They were noisy,
ignorant, coarse young creatures, like children unable to see beyond the
pleasure or the discomfort of the day, unable to help themselves out of
the sordid rut in which they had been born. Julia watched them soberly,
silently, as the years went by. One by one they told her of their
wedding plans, and introduced the boyish, ill-shaven, grinning lads who
were to be husbands and fathers soon. One by one Julia watched the
pitifully gay little weddings, in rooms poisonous with foul air and
crowded with noisy kinspeople. One by one she welcomed old members of
the Girls' Club as new members of the Mothers' Club. The young mother's
figure would be curiously shapeless now, her girlish beauty swept away
as by a sponge, her nervous pride in the beribboned baby weakened by her
own physical weakness and clouded by the fear that already a second
child's claim was disputing that of the first.
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