Part 38 (1/2)

”I have the actual deeds--the t.i.tles, whatever they are--to the property MY money comes from. He gave me them a year ago, when he was sixty. I certainly dread the talk there'll be when his will comes to light, but Joe will be here then, and Joe isn't afraid of any one.”

”He's done for you what Pa should have done,” Martie mused.

”Oh, well, Pa did his best for us, Mart.” Sally said dutifully; ”he gave us a good home--”

”WAS it a good home?” Martie questioned mildly.

”It was a much finer home than MY children have, Mart.”

”As far as walls and tables and silver spoons, I suppose it was. But, Sally, there's no child alive who has a sweeter atmosphere than this--always with mother, always learning, and always considered! Why, my boy is blooming already in it!”

Sally's face flushed with pleasure.

”Martie, you make me so proud!”

”If you can only keep it up, Sally. With me it doesn't matter so much, because I've only the one, and no husband whose claims might interfere.

But when 'Lizabeth and Mary, as well as the boys, are older--”

”You mean--always let them have their friends at the house, and so on?”

Sally asked slowly.

”Yes, but more than that! Let them feel as much a part of the world as the boys do. Put them into any work--only make them respect it!”

”Pa might have helped us, only neither you nor I, nor Lyd, ever showed the least interest in work,” Sally submitted thoughtfully.

”Neither did Len--but he MADE Len!”

”Yes, I see what you mean,” Sally admitted with an awakening face. ”But we would have thought he was pretty stern, Mart,” she added.

”Just as children do when they have to learn to read and write,”

countered Martie. ”Don't you see?”

Sally did not see, but she was glad to see Martie's interest. She told Lydia later that Martie really seemed better and more like her old self, even in these few days.

With almost all the women of Monroe, Lydia now considered Martie's life a thing accomplished, and boldly accomplished. To leave home, to marry, to have children in a strange city, to be honorably widowed and to return to her father's home, and rear her child in seclusion and content; this was more than fell to the lot of many women. Lydia listened with actual shudders to Martie's casually dropped revelations.

”This John Dryden that I told you about, Lyd--the man who wrote the play that failed--was anxious for me to go on with the Curley boarding-house,” Martie said one day, ”and sometimes now I think I should have done so.”

”Good heavens!” Lydia, smoothing the thin old blankets on Martie's wide, flat bed, stopped aghast. ”But why should you--Pa is more than willing to have you here!”

”I know, darling. But what really deterred me was not so much Pa's generosity, but the fact that I would have had to lease the property for three years; George Curley wanted to be rid of the responsibility.

And to really make the thing a success, I should have had the adjoining house, too; that would have been about four thousand rent.”

”Four thousand--Martie, you would have been crazy!”

Martie, tinkling pins into a saucer on the bureau, opening the upper drawer to sweep her brush and comb into it, and jerking the limp linen scarf straight, only smiled and shrugged in answer. She had been widowed three months, and already reviving energy and self-confidence were running in her veins. Already she realized that it had been a mistake to accept her father's hospitality in the first panic of being dependent. However graceful and dignified her position was to the outsider's eye, in this old house in the sunken block, she knew now that Pa was really unable to offer her anything more than a temporary relief from financial worry, and that her chances of finding employment in Monroe as compared to New York were about one to ten.