, Ted!" she said as they
went out.

"Wull we?" Teddy asked regretfully. They went into the pushing and
crowding of the streets; heard the shrill trill of the crossing
policeman's whistle again; caught a glimpse of Broadway's lights,
fanning lower and higher, and as the big signs rippled up and down.

Martie drank it in eagerly, no faintest shadow of apprehension fell
upon this evening. She and Teddy walked to their little hotel;
to-morrow she would see her editor, and they would search for cheaper
quarters. She would get the half-promised position or another; it
mattered not which. She would board economically, or find diminutive
quarters for housekeeping; be comfortable either way. If they kept
house, some kindly old woman would be found to give Teddy bread and
butter when he came in from school. And on hot summer Sundays she and
Teddy would pack their lunch, and make an early start for the beach;
theoretically, it would be an odd life for the child, but actually--how
much richer and more sympathetic she would make it than her own had
been! Children are natural gypsies, and Teddy would never complain
because his mother kept him up later than was quite conventional in the
evening, and sometimes took him to her office, to draw pictures or look
at books for a quiet hour.

And she would have friends: women who were working like herself, and
men, too. She was as little afraid of the other as of the one now.
There would be visits to country cottages; there would be winter
dinners, down on the Square. And some day, perhaps, she would have the
studio with the bare floors and the dark rugs. Over and over again she
said the words to herself: she was free; she was free.

Dependence on Pa's whim, on Wallace's whim, was over. She stood alone,
now; she could make for herself that life that every man was always
free to make; that every woman should be offered, too. She had suffered
bitterly; she might live to be an old, old woman, but she knew that the
sight of a fluffy-headed girl baby must always stab her with
unendurable pain. She had been shabby, hungry, ashamed, penniless,
humiliated. She had been ill, physically handicapped for weary weeks
upon weeks.

And she had emerged, armed for the fight. The world needed her now,
Cliff and Pa needed her, even Dr. Ben and Sally and Len would have been
proud to offer her a home. Miss Fanny was missing her now; a dozen
persons idling into the Library in sleepy little Monroe's summer fo