"Have you had your lunch?" Adele was asking. "We haven't. I was kept by the girl at the milliner's—"

It was one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Martie was free to lunch where she pleased. She was free even to sit down with a woman whose name was under a cloud. They all crowded into an express elevator, and sat down at a table in the restaurant on the twelfth floor.

Presently the unreality of it faded from Martie's uppermost consciousness and she began to enjoy herself. To sit with the wife of a Mystic Shriner, and the woman who had done what Adele had done, and whose husband incidentally was deeply devoted to herself, was not according to Monroe. But she was in New York!

"I guess I was a silly girl, misled by a man of the world," Adele was saying in her old, complaining, complacent voice. "I know I was a fool, Martie, but don't men do that sort of thing all the time, and get over it? Why should us women pay all the time? You know as well as I do that John Dryden was just as queer as Dick's hatband; I was hungering, as a girl will, for pleasure and excitement—"

"It was a dirty crime, the way that doctor acted," Mrs. Baker contributed, her tone much pleasanter than her words. "He must have been a skunk, if you ask me. Adele here was wrong, Mrs. Bannister; you and I won't quarrel about that. But Adele wasn't nothing but a child at heart—"

"I believed anything he told me!" Adele drawled, playing with her knife and fork, her lashes dropped.

"Dryden," the loyal sister continued majestically, "threw her over the second he got a chance; that's what she got for putting up with HIM for all those years! And then, if you please, this other feller discovers that he can't get rid of his wife. I came on then," she said warmly as Martie murmured her sympathy, "and I says to Adele, throw the whole crowd of them down. Billy Baker and I have plenty, and my daughter—Ruby, she's a lovely girl and she's married an elegant feller whose people own about all the lumber interests in our part of the country—she doesn't need anything from us. But if you ask me, it's just about killed Adele," she went on frankly, glancing at her sister, "she looks like a sick girl to me. We came on two or three days ago, to see a specialist about her, and I declare I'll be glad to get her back."

"What has become of Dr. Cooper?" Martie felt justified in asking.

"He lost all the practice he ever had, they say," Mrs. Baker said viciously. "And good enough for him, too! His wife won't even see him, and he lives at some boarding-house; and serve him right!"

"And Jack's book such a success!" Adele said, widening her eyes at Martie. "Do you ever see him?"

"He's got a great friend in Dean Silver, the novelist," Martie answered composedly. "I believe they're abroad."

"The idea!" Adele said lifelessly. She was playing with her bracelets now, and looked about her in an aimless way.

"Well, if this little girl has any sense she'll let the past be the past," remarked the optimistic Mrs. Baker. "There's a fellow out our way, Joe Chase; he's got a cattle ranch. You never heard of him? He's a di'mond in the rough, if you ask me, but he's been crazy about Adele ever since she first visited me. He'd give her anything in God's world."

"But I think I'd die of loneliness winters!" Adele said, with the smile of a petted child.

So there was a third man eager to sacrifice his life to her, Martie marvelled. Adele would consider herself a martyr if she succumbed to the wiles of the rough diamond; she would puzzle and distress him in his ranch-house; she would Fret and exact and complain. Probably one of the Swedish farmers thereabout could give him a daughter who would make him an infinitely better wife, and bear him children, and worship him blindly. But no; he must yearn for this neurotic, abnormal little creature, with her ugly history and her barren brain and body.

"Isn't it funny how unlucky I am, Martie?" Adele asked at parting. "If you'll tell me why one woman has to have so much bad luck, and others just sail along on the top of the wave, I'll be obliged to you!" She came close to Martie, her faded, bitter little face flushing suddenly. "Now this Mrs. Cooper," she said in a low tone, "her father was a shoe manufacturer, and left her half a million dollars. Of course, it's a SNAP for her to say she'll do this, and say she'll do that! She says it's for the children she refuses the divorce, but the real reason is she wants him back. She can live in New York—"

Adele's voice trailed off disconsolately. Martie felt a genuine pang of sympathy for the unhappy little creature whose one claim had been of sex, and who had made her claim so badly.

"Write me now and then!" she said warmly.

"Oh, I will!" Adele stretched up to kiss the taller woman, and Mrs. Baker kissed her, too. Martie went away smiling; over all its waste and suffering life was amusing, after all.

Would John, with his irregular smile and his sea-blue eyes and his reedy voice, also come back into her life some day? She could not say. The threads of human intercourse were tangled enough to make living a blind business at best, and she had deliberately tangled the web that held them even more deeply than life had done. Before he himself was back from long wandering, before he learned that she was in the city, and that there had been no second marriage, months, perhaps years, must go by.

Martie accepted the possibility serenely. She asked nothing better than work and companionship, youth and health, and Teddy. Every day was a separate adventure in happiness; she had never been happy before.

And suppose this was only the beginning, she wondered. Suppose real achievement and real success lay ahead? Suppose she was one of the women to whom California would some day point with pride? Deep in her singing heart she suspected that it was true. How it was to come about she could only guess. By her pen, of course. By some short story suddenly inspired, or by one of her flashing articles on the women's problems of the day. She was not a Shakespeare, not a George Eliot, but she had something for which the world would pay.

Nine years since the September when Rodney Parker had flashed into her world; a long nine years. Sitting under her green-shaded reading lamp, Martie reviewed them, for herself, and for Sally. She and Sally had thought of Dr. Ben as only an amiable theorist then, but there had been nothing theoretical about the help he had given Sally and Joe with their problem.

Martie had solved her own alone. Rodney, Pa, Wallace, and John had all entered into it, but no one of them had helped her. It was in spite of them rather than because of them that she was sitting here poised, established, needed at last. She saw her life to-night as a long road, climbing steadily up from the fields and valleys, mounting, sometimes in storm, and sometimes in fog, but always mounting toward the mountains. Rose and Adele and Lydia were content with the lowlands, the quiet, sunny plains below. She must have the heights.

There were other women seeking that rising road; perhaps she might help them. Love and wifehood and motherhood she had known, now she would know the joy of perfected expression, the fulfillment of the height. She dedicated herself solemnly, joyfully, to the claim of the years ahead. Ten years ago she might have said that at twenty-eight the best of a woman's life was over. Now she knew that she had only begun to live.



THE END