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Like other fashionable young ladies, Julia fancied her own tastes in literature, music and the arts; but. perhaps because of her scattered schooling, her spelling was not up to snuff. "Asparagrass . . . tasted diliciously"; to forward swains she could be "very fridged indeed''; of one Hooker Hammersly she states: "He is not the man for My Sister by a long short." She must have read even her favorite authors with half an eye: "I have just read Mrs Gasgells life of Charlotte Brontë, & enjoyed it immensely, almost as much as Jane Ayer." But she was often a shrewd observer. Of General Phil Sheridan she notes: "When anyone makes a commonplace remark or says something that does not interest him, he says, 'um, um, yes. yes,' in the most aggravating manner." She quotes, though without approval, the remark of an English fellow-traveler: "I think one always feels so cross & nasty if one gets up before noon, & then besides the world is not well aired before that time."
Julia lived in an exciting world, and knew it. She heard Adelina Patti sing, was carried away by Johann Strauss's conducting, thrilled to Col. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte's eyewitness account of Balaclava, wrote exclamation-filled pages on the Franco-Prussian War, and mourned, as even a poor little rich girl could, the Chicago Fire which swept away their grand house, her studio with its private staircase.