"Your sisters and your brother are going, I suppose?" Malcolm asked, glancing about the circle. Martie told herself she might have known he was not done with the subject so easily.

"I'm not--because I haven't the price!" grinned Leonard. His mother and Lydia laughed.

"I don't suppose Martie proposes going alone with young Parker?"

Malcolm asked in well-a.s.sumed amazement.

"Why, Pa--I don't see why NOT" Mrs. Monroe protested weakly.

Her husband was magnificent in his surprise. He looked about in a sort of royal astonishment.

"Don't you, my dear?" he asked politely. "Then permit me to say that _I_ DO."

Martie sat dumb with despair.

"Certainly Martha may go, if Leonard and one of her sisters go; not otherwise," said Malcolm. He retired to his library, and Martie had to ease her boiling heart by piling the dinner dishes viciously, and question no more.

However, she consoled herself, there was something rather dignified in this arrangement, after all; Len was presentable, and she was always the happier for being with Sally. She washed her only gloves, pressed her suit, and spent every alternate minute during the next day anxiously inspecting her chin where an ugly pimple threatened to form.

The family was again at dinner when Len broached a change of plan.

"Can I go up to Wilson's to-night, Pa?" he asked. Martie flashed him a glance.

"I suppose so, for a little while," Malcolm said tolerantly. The girls looked at each other.

"But I thought you were going to the Opera House with us?" Martie exclaimed.

"Well, now you know I ain't," Len answered airily.

"I am not, Len," corrected his mother. Martie gave him a look of hate.

"Len says he promised to go to Wilson's," Lydia said placatingly. "So I thought perhaps Sally and I would go with you--I'm sorry, Martie!"

For Martie's breast was heaving dangerously.

"Pa, didn't you say Len was to go with us?" she asked with desperate calm.

"I said SOME ONE was to go," Malcolm said, disapproving of her vehemence. "I confess I cannot see why it must be Len!"

"Because--because when a man asks a girl to go out with him he doesn't ask the whole FAMILY!" Martie muttered in a fury. Her lip trembled, and she got to her feet. "It doesn't matter in the least," she said in a low, shaking voice, "because I am not going myself!"

Flashing from the room, she ran upstairs. She flung herself across her bed, and cried stormily for ten minutes. Then she grew calmer, and lay there crying quietly, and shaken by only an occasional long sob. It was during this stage that Lydia came into the room, and sitting down beside Martie's knees, patted her hand soothingly. Lydia's weak acceptance of the younger sister's distaste for her company gave Martie a sort of shamed heart-sickness.

"Don't!" said she huskily, jerking her arm away.

But Lydia was not to be rebuffed, and Martie was but nineteen, after all, and longing for the happiness she had denied. An hour later, all the prettier for her tears, she met Rodney at the hall door, the boy making no sign of disappointment when Lydia and Sally joined them.

"But say, Martie," he said at once, "I've got only the two seats!"

"Oh, that's all right!" Lydia said quickly and cautiously. "We don't have to SIT together!"

Martie's mood brightened and she flushed like a rose when the boy said eagerly:

"Say, listen, Martie. My sister Ida's going to-night, and one or two others, and Mrs. Cliff Frost is going to chaperon us afterward; ask your mother if that's all right."

The girl wasted no time on her mother, but crossed to the library door.

"Pa," said she without preamble, "Mrs. Cliff Frost is chaperoning some of them after the theatre tonight. Can I go?"

"Go where? Shut that door," her father said, half turning.

"Oh--I don't know; to the hotel, I suppose."

"Yes," her father said in a dry voice. "Yes," he added unwillingly. "Go ahead."

So the evening was a great success; one of the memorable times. Martie and Rodney walked ahead of her sisters down town, the boy gallantly securing the girls' tickets before he and Martie went up the aisle to their own seats. All Monroe was in the Opera House. Martie bowed and smiled radiantly. Rodney's sister and Mrs. Frost and a strange man presently returned her smile.

"Rod--wouldn't you rather be with your own family?"

"Well--what do you think?"

The enchantment of it, the warmth and stimulus of his admiration, his absorbed companionship, how they changed the world for Martie! There was a witchery in the air, the blood ran quick in her veins. The dirty big hall, with its high windows, was fairyland; the whispering crowd, Rodney's nearness, and the consciousness of her own youth and beauty, her flushed cheeks and loosened bronze hair, acted upon Martie like strong wine. She grew lovely beneath his very eyes; she was nineteen, and she loved!

They talked incessantly, elaborating the simple things they said with a by-play of eyes and hands, making the insignificant words rich with lowered tones, with smiles and the meeting of eyes. He told Martie of his college days; borrowing episodes at random from the lives of other men, men whom he admired. Martie believed it all, believed that he had written the Junior Farce, that he had been president of his cla.s.s, that the various college societies had disputed for his membership. In return, she spun her own romances, flinging a veil of attractive eccentricity over her father's character, generously giving Lydia an anonymous admirer, and painting the dreary old mansion of North Main Street as a sort of enchanted prison with her pretty restless self as captive therein. The two exchanged brief French phrases, each believing the other to have a fair command of the language, and Martie even quoted poetry, to which Rodney listened in intense silence, his eyes fixed upon hers.

Suddenly the house was darkened and the curtain rose. The play was "The Sword of the King," a drama that seemed to Martie well suited to her own exalted mood. She thought the whole company wonderful, the leading lady especially gifted. She learned with awe that Rodney had known Wallace Bannister, the leading man, more or less intimately for years.

An aunt of his lived in Pittsville and the two had met as boys and later had been cla.s.smates for the brief period Bannister had remained at the Leland Stanford University. Martie wrapped her beauty-starved young soul in the perfect past, when men wore ruffles and buckles and capes, and were all gallantry and courage, and when women were beautiful and desired. Between the acts the delicious exchange of confidences between herself and Rodney went on; they nibbled Bonestell's chocolates from a striped paper bag as they talked, and when the final curtain fell on a ringing line there were real tears of pleasure in Martie's eyes.

"Oh, Rodney--this is LIVING!" she whispered, as they filed slowly out.

Sally and Lydia had considerately disappeared. Mrs. Clifford Frost was waiting for them at the door, and Martie, with quick tact, fell into conversation with the kindly matron, walking at her side down the crowded street, and leaving Rodney to follow with the others. Little Ruth Frost had had some trouble fearfully resembling diphtheria, and Martie's first interested question was enough to enlist the mother's attention. The girl did not really notice the others in the party.

They crossed muddy Main Street, pa.s.sed Wilkins's Furniture and Coffin Parlours, and went into the shabby French restaurant known as Mussoo's.

The little eating house, with its cheap, white-painted shop window, looking directly upon the sidewalk, its pyramid of oyster sh.e.l.ls cascading from a box set by the entrance, its jangling bell that the opening door set to clanging, its dingy cash register, damp tablecloths, and bottles of red catsup, was not a place to which Monroe residents pointed with pride. Martie would ordinarily have pa.s.sed it as one unaware of its existence.

But it seemed a thoroughly daring and exciting thing to come here to-night; quite another thing from going to the hotel for vanilla ice cream and chocolate--even supposing the hotel had kept its dining room open for a change, after the six o'clock supper--or to Bonestell's for banana specials. This--this was living! Martie established herself comfortably in the corner, slipped off her coat, smiled lazily at Rodney's obvious manipulation of the party so that he should be next her, played with her hot, damp, blackened knife and fork, and was in paradise.

Ida Parker was in the party, and Florence Frost. The men were Clifford Frost, a pleasant young man getting stout and bald at forty; Billy Frost, a gentle little lad of fifteen who was lame; Rodney, and a rosy-cheeked, black-moustached Dr. Ellis from San Francisco, whose occasional rather simple and stupid remarks were received with great enthusiasm by Ida and Florence.

In this group Martie shone. She had her own gift for ready nonsense, and she was the radiant element that blended the varied types into a happy whole. She skilfully ignored Rodney; Billy, Mary, Cliff, and even Dr. Ellis were drawn into her fun. Rodney glowed. "Isn't she great?" he said to Mary Frost in an aside.

A large bowl of small crackers was set before them, damp squares of strong b.u.t.ter on small nicked plates, finally a bowl of pink, odorous shrimps. These were all gone when, after a long wait, the fried oysters came smoking hot, slipped straight from the pan to the plates. Martie drank coffee, as Mary did; the others had thick goblets of red wine.

With the hot, warming food, their gaiety waxed higher; everybody felt that the party was a great success.

The bell on the door reverberated, and a man came in alone, and looked about undecidedly for a seat.

"h.e.l.lo!" said Rodney. "There's Wallace Bannister!"

The young actor joined them. And this, to Martie, was one of the most thrilling moments of her life. He quite openly wedged his way in to sit on the other side of her; he said that he could see they didn't need the gaslight when Miss Monroe was along. Rodney said she was Brunhilde, and Bannister's comment was that she could save wig bills with that hair! Florence said eagerly that she loved Brunhilde--let's see, what opera did that come in? It was the Ring, anyway. The spirits of the group rose every second.

Ah, this was living--thought Martie. Oysters and wine and a real actor, a man who knew the world, who chattered of Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as if they had been Monroe and Pittsville. It was intoxicating to hear him exchanging comments with Rodney; no, he hadn't finished "coll." "I'm a rolling stone, Miss Monroe; we actor-fellows always are!" He was "signed up" now; he gave them a glimpse of a long, typewritten contract. Martie ventured a question as to the leading lady.