"She's a nice woman," said Wallace Bannister generously. "I like to play against Mabel. Jesse Cluett, her husband, is in the play; and his kid, too, her stepson--Lloyd--he's seventeen. Ever try the profession, Miss Monroe?"

Martie flushed a pleased disclaimer. But the tiny seed was sown, nevertheless. She liked the question; she was even vaguely glad that Mrs. Cluett was forty and a married woman.

Wallace Bannister was older than Rodney, thirty or thirty-two, although even off the stage he looked much younger. He had dipped into college work in a dull season, amusing himself idly in the elementary cla.s.ses of French and English where his knowledge in these branches gave him immediate prominence--and drifting away in a road company after only a few months of fraternity and campus popularity. His mother and father were both dead; the latter had been a theatrical manager in a small way, sending little stock companies up and down the coast for one-night stands.

Bannister was tall, well-built, and handsome. His cheeks had a fresh fullness, and his black hair was as shining as wet coal. He was eager and magnetic; musical, literary, or religious, according to the company in which he found himself. Martie's thrilled interest firing him to-night, he exerted himself: told stories in Chinese dialect, in brogue, and with an excellent Scotch burr; he went to the rickety piano, and from the loose keys, usually set in motion by a nickel in the slot, he evoked brilliant songs, looking over his shoulder with his sentimental bold eyes at the company as he sang. And Martie said to herself, "Ah--this IS life!"

Rodney took her home, the clock in the square booming the half hour after midnight as they went by. And at the side door he told her to look up at the Dipper throbbing in the cool sky overhead. Martie knew what was coming, but she looked innocently up, and went to sleep for the first time in her life with a man's kiss still tingling on her smiling lips.

The cold November weather might have been rosy June; the dull routine of the Monroe home a life rich and full for Martie now. She sang like a lark, feeding the chickens in the foggy mornings; she dimpled at her own reflection in the mirror; she walked down town as if treading the clouds. Anything interested her, everything interested her. Mrs. Harry Locker, born Preble, said that Martie just seemed inspired, the way she talked when old lady Preble died. Miss f.a.n.n.y, in the Library, began to entertain serious hopes that the girl would take the Cutter system to heart, and make a clever understudy at the old desk. Sally, watching, dreamed and yearned of Martie's distinction, Martie's happiness; Lydia prayed. Malcolm Monroe, as became a man of dignity, ignored the whole affair, but Len, realizing that various advantages accrued, befriended his sister, and talked to Rodney familiarly, as man to man.

"I can't stand that fresh kid!" said Rodney of Len. Martie shrugged without speaking. She owed Len no allegiance. Had it suited Rodney to admire Len, Martie would have been a loyal sister. As it was, she would not risk a difference with Rodney for any one like Len. She was embarked now upon a vital matter of business. Had a few hundreds of dollars been involved, Malcolm Monroe would have been at her elbow, advising, commending. As it was, her happiness, her life, her children, her whole future might be jeopardized or secured with no sign from him.

Interference from her mother or sisters would have been considered indelicate. So Martie stood alone.

Immediately after the theatre party, the question of a series of dances again arose, and Martie somewhat hesitatingly repeated her offer of the Monroe house for the first. Rodney's friend, Alvah Brigham, was to come to the Parker family for Thanksgiving; the dance was to be on Friday night, and a large picnic to Brewster's Woods on Sat.u.r.day. They would take a lunch, build a fire for their coffee, and have the old school-day programme of singing and games.

For the dance, the two big parlours and the back room must be cleared; that was simple enough. Angela Baxter would be at the piano for the music; sufficient, if not extraordinary, and costing only two dollars.

The supper would be sandwiches, cake, coffee, and lemonade: Monroe's invariable supper. Rodney thought ices necessary, and suggested at least a salad. Martie and Sally considered the salad.

"Lord, I wish we could have a punch," Rodney complained. The girls laughed.

"Oh, Rod--Pa would explode!"

"Darn it," the boy mused, "I don't see WHY. He's not a teetotaler."

"Well, I know," Martie conceded. "But that's different, of course!

No--we can't have punch. I don't know how to make it, anyway--" She was hardly following her own words. Under them lay the wonderful consciousness that Rodney Parker was here at the house, sitting on the porch steps on a warm November morning, as much at home as Leonard himself. The sun was looking down into the dark garden, damp paths were drying in sudden warmth after a rain.

In such an hour and such a mood, Martie felt absolutely confident that the dance would be a great success. More; it seemed to her in the heartening morning sunlight that it would be the first of many such innocent festivities, and that before it was over--before it was over, she and Rodney might have something wonderful to tell the girls and boys of Monroe.

But in the long winter afternoons her confidence waned a little, and at night, dreaming over her cards, she began to have serious misgivings.

Then the old house seemed cold and inhospitable and the burden of carrying a social affair to success fell like a dreadful weight on the girl's soul. Mama, Lydia, and Sally would cooperate to the best of their power, of course; Pa and Len might be expected to make themselves as annoying as possible.

Supper, decorations, even the question of gowns paled before the task of making a list of guests. Sally and Martie early realized that they must inevitably hurt the feelings and disappoint the trust of more than one old friend. Mrs. Monroe and Lydia grew absolutely sick over the necessity.

"Ma, this is just for the younger set," Martie argued. "And if people like Miss f.a.n.n.y and the Johnsons expect to come to it, why, it's ridiculous, that's all!"

"I know, dear, but it's the first party we have given in YEARS" her mother said plaintively, "and one hates to--"

"What I've DONE" said Martie in a worried tone, "is write down all the POSSIBLE boys in Monroe, even counting Len and Billy Frost, and Rod, and Alvah Brigham. Then I wrote down all the girls I'd like to ask if I COULD, and there were about fourteen too many. So now I'm scratching off all the girls I CAN--"

"I do think you ought to ask Grace Hawkes!" Lydia said firmly and reproachfully.

"Well, I can't!" Martie answered quickly. "So it doesn't matter what you think! I beg your pardon, Lyd," she added penitently, laying her hand on Lydia's arm. "But you know Rodney's sisters would die if Grace came!"

"Well, I think it's a mistake to slight Grace," Lydia persisted.

Martie studied her pencilled list gloomily for a few seconds.

"Sometimes I wish we weren't having it!" she said moodily.

"Oh, Martie, when we've always said we'd give ANYTHING to entertain as other people do!" Sally exclaimed. "I DO think that's unreasonable!"

Martie made no answer. She was looking at a memorandum which read: "Invitations--cream--Angela--stamps--illusion--slippers."

As the days went by the thought of the dance grew more and more troublesome. The details of the affair were too strange to be entered into with any confidence, any rush of enthusiasm and spontaneity. Every hour brought her fresh cause for worry.

Nothing went well. The thought of her dress worried her. She had conceived the idea of a black gown ornamented with cretonne roses, carefully applied. She and Sally cut out the flowers, and applied them with b.u.t.tonhole st.i.tch, sewing until their fingers were sore, their faces flushed, and their hair in frowsy disorder. It was slow work.

Miss Pepper, the seamstress, engaged for one day only to do the important work on both Sally's and Martie's gown, kept postponing, as she always did postpone, the day, finally appointing the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day. Pa's cousin, a certain Mrs. Potts, wrote from Portland that she was coming down for the holiday, and Sally and Martie could have wept at the thought of the complication of having her exacting presence in the house. Worse than this Pa, who was to have gone to San Francisco on business on Friday morning--whose decision to do so had indeed been one of Martie's reasons for selecting this date for the affair--suddenly changed his plan. He need not go until December, he said.

Leonard, who at first had been faintly interested in the proceedings, later annoyed his sisters by intimating that he would not be present at the dance. Martie and Sally did not want him for any social qualities he possessed, but he was a male; he would at least help to offset the alarming plurality of females.

Acceptances came promptly from the young women of Monroe, even from Ida and May Parker. Florence Frost regretted; she was smitten even now with the incurable illness that would end her empty life a few years later.

Such men as Martie and Sally had been able to list as eligible--the new young doctor from the Rogers building, little Billy Frost, the Patterson boys, home from college for Thanksgiving, Reddy Johnson, and Carl Polhemus--answered not at all, as is the custom with young men.

Sally and Martie did not like the Patterson boys; George was fat and stupid; Arthur at eighteen sophisticated and blase, with dissipated eyes; both were supercilious, and the girls did not really believe that they would come. Still, there was not much to lose in asking them.

There had been a debate over Reddy Johnson's name; but Reddy was a wonderful dancer. So he was asked, and Martie went so far as to say that had Joe Hawkes possessed an evening suit, he and Grace might have been asked, too. As it was, Sally and Martie hoped they would not meet Grace until the affair was over.

They fumed and fussed over the list until they knew it by heart. They wondered who would come first, how soon they should begin dancing, how soon serve supper. Mrs. Monroe thought supper should be served at half-past ten. Martie groaned. Oh, they couldn't serve supper until almost midnight, she protested.

Dinner was at noon on Thanksgiving Day, and the Monroes, sated and overwarm, were sitting about the fire when Rodney Parker and his friend, Alvah Brigham, came to take Martie and Sally walking. The girls were sewing at the endless roses; but they jumped up in a flutter, and ran for hats and sweaters. They did not exchange a word, nor lose a second, while they were upstairs, running down again immediately to end the uncomfortable silence that held the group about the fire.

It was a cold, bleak day, and the pure air was delicious to Martie's hot cheeks after the close house. She had immediately taken possession of Alvah; Sally and Rodney followed. They took the old bridge road, which the girls loved for the memory of bygone days, when they had played at dolls' housekeeping along the banks of the little Sonora, climbed the low oaks, and waded in the bright shallow water. Even through to-day's excitement Martie had time for a memory of those long-ago summer afternoons, and she said to herself with a vague touch of pain that it would of course be impossible to have with any man the serene communion of those days with Sally.

Mr. Brigham was a pale, rather fat young man with hair already thinning. He did not have much to say, but he was always ready to laugh, and Martie saw that he had cause for laughter. She rattled on recklessly, anxious only to avoid silence; hardly conscious of what she said. The effect of the cool, fresh air was lost upon Martie to-day; she was fired to fever-pitch by Rodney's nearness.

He had not ever said anything exactly loverlike, she said to herself, with a sort of breathless discontent, when she was setting the table for a cold supper that night. But he had brought his friend to them after all! She must not be exacting. She had so much--

"I beg your pardon, Cousin Allie?" she stammered. Her obnoxious relative, a stout, moustached woman of fifty, warming her skirts at the fire, was smiling at her unkindly.

"You always was a great one to moon, Martha!" said Mrs. Potts, "I's asking you what you see in that young feller to make such a to-do about?"

"Then you don't like him?" Martie countered, laughing. Mrs. Potts bridled. Her favourite att.i.tude toward life was a bland but suspicious superiority; she liked to be taken seriously.

"I didn't say I didn't like him," she answered, accurately, a little nettled. "No, my dear, I didn't say that. No. I wouldn't say that of any young man!" she added thoughtfully.

Smiling a dark smile, she looked into the fire. Martie, rather uncomfortable, went on with her task.

"He's seemed to admire our Mart in a brotherly sort of way since the very beginning," Lydia explained, anxious as usual to say the kind thing, and succeeding as usual in saying the one thing that could hurt and annoy. "He's quite a boy for the girls, but we think our Martie is too sensible to take him seriously, yet awhile!" And Lydia gave her sister a smile full of sweet significance.

"HOPE she is!" Mrs. Potts said heavily. "For if that young feller means business I miss MY guess!"

"Oh, for pity's sake--can't a man ask a girl to go walking without all this fuss!" Martie burst out angrily. "I NEVER heard so much--crazy--silly--talk--about--nothing!"

The last words were only an ashamed mumble as she disappeared kitchenward.

"H'm!" said Mrs. Potts, eying Lydia over her gla.s.ses. "Kinder touchy about him just the same. Well! what's he to that young feller used to come see you, Lydia? Ain't the Frosts and the Parkers kin?"

"I really think she's the most detestable old woman that ever was!"