she wants him back. She can live in New York--"

Adele's voice trailed off disconsolately. Martie felt a genuine pang of
sympathy for the unhappy little creature whose one claim had been of
sex, and who had made her claim so badly.

"Write me now and then!" she said warmly.

"Oh, I will!" Adele stretched up to kiss the taller woman, and Mrs.
Baker kissed her, too. Martie went away smiling; over all its waste and
suffering life was amusing, after all.

Would John, with his irregular smile and his sea-blue eyes and his
reedy voice, also come back into her life some day? She could not say.
The threads of human intercourse were tangled enough to make living a
blind business at best, and she had deliberately tangled the web that
held them even more deeply than life had done. Before he himself was
back from long wandering, before he learned that she was in the city,
and that there had been no second marriage, months, perhaps years, must
go by.

Martie accepted the possibility serenely. She asked nothing better than
work and companionship, youth and health, and Teddy. Every day was a
separate adventure in happiness; she had never been happy before.

And suppose this was only the beginning, she wondered. Suppose real
achievement and real success lay ahead? Suppose she was one of the
women to whom California would some day point with pride? Deep in her
singing heart she suspected that it was true. How it was to come about
she could only guess. By her pen, of course. By some short story
suddenly inspired, or by one of her flashing articles on the women's
problems of the day. She was not a Shakespeare, not a George Eliot, but
she had something for which the world would pay.

Nine years since the September when Rodney Parker had flashed into her
world; a long nine years. Sitting under her green-shaded reading lamp,
Martie reviewed them, for herself, and for Sally. She and Sally had
thought of Dr. Ben as only an amiable theorist then, but there had been
nothing theoretical about the help he had given Sally and Joe with
their problem.

Martie had solved her own alone. Rodney, Pa, Wallace, and John had all
entered into it, but no one of them had helped her. It was in spite of
them rather than because of them that she was sitting here poised,
established, needed at last. She saw her life to-night as a long road,
climbing steadily up from the fields and valleys, mounting, sometimes
in storm, and sometimes in fog, but always mo