She was not trained to business responsibility: she merely laughed
because her old employer was annoyed to have her housekeeper desert
her. After all, could there be a better reason for any move than that
one's husband wished it? Swiftly and gaily she snapped the ties that
bound her to the boarding-house.

There seemed to be plenty of money for teas and dinners: she stared
about the brightly lighted restaurants like an excited child. Wallace
was boisterously fond of his son, but he was too busy to be much with
Teddy, and he wanted his wife all day and every day. So Martie engaged
a housekeeper to take her place in the house, and a little coloured
girl to take care of Teddy, and devoted herself to Wallace.

CHAPTER V

The flat in East Twenty-sixth Street was not what Martie's lonely
dreams had fashioned, but she accepted it with characteristic courage
and made it a home. She had hoped for something irregular,
old-fashioned: big rooms, picturesque windows, picturesque
inconveniences, interesting neighbours.

She found five rooms in a narrow, eight-story, brick apartment-house; a
narrow parlour with a cherry mantel and green tiles, separated from a
narrow bedroom by closed folding doors, a narrow, long hall passing a
dark little bathroom and the tiny dark room that Teddy had, a small
dining room finished in black wood and red paper, and, wedged against
it, a strip of kitchen.

These were small quarters after the airy bareness of the Curley home,
and they were additionally reduced in effect by the peculiar taste
their first occupant had shown in furnishing. The walls were crowded
with heavily framed pictures, coloured photographs of children in livid
pink and yellow gowns dancing to the music played by draped ladies at
grand pianos; kittens in hats, cheap prints of nude figures, with ugly
legends underneath. The chairs were of every period ever sacrificed to
flimsy reproduction: gilt, Mission, Louis XIV, Pembroke, and old
English oak. There were curtains, tassels, fringes, and portieres
everywhere, of cotton brocade, velours, stencilled burlap, and "art"
materials generally. There was a Turkish corner, with a canopy,
daggers, crescents, and cushions. The bookcase in the parlour and the
china cabinet in the dining room were locked. The latter was so large,
and the room it adorned so small, that it stood at an angle, partly
shutting out the light of the one window. Every room except the parlour
opened upon an