"Juliette? I'm glad you've come hunting her. I'm sure I don't know what we're going to do with her, Selina. She's never been stubborn or ugly in her life before. It's been going on now for sometime, this undercurrent of resentment to her father, and I don't mind speaking out with you, Selina, we look on you quite as one of ourselves, it's come to a break, an open rupture between them. Her father can't see it anyway but that she's been underhand in her defiance, and she won't allow that she cares in the least what he thinks. Of course, I don't know how much she may have told you. Go on up to her room. The little girls are at school, and I'm thankful the baby's asleep. Juliette and I've just finished in the kitchen and she's upstairs starting to straighten the bedrooms."
Selina went through the halls to the front stairway. She didn't fancy the Caldwells' house. Everything was over-elaborate and nothing very well cared for and there seemed a regrettable mixture. She couldn't bear the bisque cupid, for instance, which hung from the costly gilt chandelier. And she and Adele and Maud deplored the portrait of Juliette at three which hung over the mantelpiece. Cunning Judy as she really had been, here forever seated on a rose-bank, her curls in tiers, her cheeks carmine, and a sash of blue bound round her tummy so precisely that her embroidered skirts flew out beneath as though released. And Selina disliked the showy pattern in the velvet carpet on the halls and up the stairs. But she did love Juliette.
She went up the steps. She knew something of the trouble between Juliette and her father, and could guess what had brought about the present rupture. About the time she went South, Juliette had dared be audacious in a way that caused her friends to hold breath, terrified at thought of what the storm would be when discovery by her father came.
Having reached the hallway above, Selina tapped on a door which was ajar at the head of the stairs, the door to Juliette's own room. At the sound, Juliette, in an apron like the one upon her mother, turned, and seeing Selina in the doorway, sat down suddenly on an ottoman at hand and resting her black-tressed little head against the edge of the bureau she was dusting, went into passionate weeping. It was as if the sight of her friend loosed the pent-up flood of her unhappiness.