ed for the fate of a
sick cat, and had appealed to her mother for help. Mrs. Monroe had been
filling lamps, and her thin dark hands were oily and streaked with
soot, but she had been sympathetic about the kitten, and on her advice
the invalid had been wrapped in a clean cloth, and laid tenderly on the
heaps of soft, sweet, dying grass that had been raked to one side of
the lawn. Here kindly death had found the kitten a little later, and
Martie, cat and all, had climbed into her mother's lap and cried. But
she was not a little girl any longer--she would never feel her mother's
arms about her again.

The next day she received a box of roses, not remarkable roses,
inasmuch as they were rather small, of a solid red, and wired heavily
from the end of their sterns to the very flower. But the enclosed note
in which John Dryden said that he knew how hard it was for her, and was
as sorry as he could be, touched Martie. A far more beautiful gift
would not have gone to her heart quite so deeply as did this cheap box
and the damp card with its message smudged and blurred.

Through the long icy winter she began to feel, with a sense of vague
pain, that life was passing, that if she and Wallace were ever to have
that big, shadowy studio, that long-awaited time of informal
hospitality and financial ease, it must come soon. Her marriage was
already measured by years; yet she was still a child in Wallace's
hands. He could leave her thus bound and thus free; she was helpless,
and she began to chafe against the injustice of it. One day she found,
and rewrote her old article, filled with her own resentful theories of
a girl's need of commercial fitness. She sent it to a magazine; it was
almost immediately returned.

But the episode bore fruit, none the less. For, discussing it with
John, as she discussed everything with John, she was led to accept his
advice as to the appearance of the closely written sheets. It would
have a much better chance if it were typewritten, he assured her. He
carried it off to his stenographer.

This was in April, and as, with characteristic forgetfulness, he failed
to bring it back, Martie, chancing to pass his office one day,
determined to go in and get it for herself. She had never been in
John's place of business before. She went from the spring warmth and
dazzle of the street into the pleasant dimness of the big store that
smelled pleasantly of reedy things, wickerwork and carpets.

Three or four sales