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Lydia lighted the fire, and as Leonard had made his escape, Belle brought up a supplementary hodful of coal. Martie lighted two of the four gas jets, and settled down to solitaire. Sally read "Idylls of the King." Lydia and her mother began to sew, the older woman busy with mending a hopelessly worn table-cloth, the younger one embroidering heavy linen with hundreds of knots.
Rose called gaily, "he does that to every one he's perfectly terrible!" "How many children has Sally now?" Florence Frost, sickly, emaciated, asked with a sort of cluck. "Four," Martie answered, smiling. "Gracious!" Florence said, drawing her shawl about her. "Poor Sally!" Rose said, with the merry laugh that accompanied everything she said.
He laughed heartily at the mere idea that the attentions of Graham Parker's son might be construed as a compliment to a Monroe, and sarcastically rebuked Lydia when, on a Sunday afternoon, she somewhat stealthily made preparations for tea. Martie and Rod were walking, and Martie, before she went, had said something vague about coming back at half-past four.
"Grace and all the others would have come," Sally said quickly, "but we knew you'd be tired, and then it's homecoming, Martie, and you'll have lots of time to see us all!" She introduced Elizabeth, a lovely, fly-away child with bright loose hair, and Billy, a freckled, ordinary-looking boy, who gave his aunt a beautiful smile from large, dark eyes. The others were left with "Mother" Joe's mother.
Suddenly they found the plural pronoun: we must do that; that doesn't interest us; Pa must not suspect our affair. "The Cluetts are going to be in Pittsville," said Wallace one day. "I want you to meet them. You'll like Mabel; she's got two little kids. She and Jesse have been married only six years. And they'll like you, too; I've told 'em you're my girl!" "Am I?" said Martie huskily.
Now she began to see that Rose mattered as little here as she had mattered when Martie was struggling in East Twenty-sixth Street. Rose "went" with the Frosts and the Streets and the Pattersons now. Her intimate friend was Dr. Ellis's wife, a girl from San Francisco. "Shall we go in for a minute, and make a little visit?" said Lydia, as she had said years ago, whenever they passed the church.
"I'll bet all the girls go crazy about him!" Sally submitted. A faint pang of jealousy, a vague sense of helplessness, seized upon Martie. He had been so cordially gay and delightful with her; would he be that with all the girls? Would Florence Frost, three years older than he, fall a victim to his charm as quickly as she, Martie, had fallen?
Rose put her violin on the piano, and explained that she had met Rodney Parker that afternoon, "hadn't seen him for YEARS!" and that he had talked her into coming. No she wouldn't play until later laughed Rose; now she wanted to dance. The hours that followed seemed to Martie like years. She never forgot them.
She was a plain, shrewd, kindly old woman, who lived in an old brownstone house that had been acquired after his death, Martie learned, for a bad debt of her husband's making. She liked everybody and believed in nobody; smiling a deep, mysterious smile when her table or her management was praised.
It became a marvel to Martie that life could go on for any one while her own future was so frightfully uncertain. She was going to have a baby, and she was not married that was the summary of the situation. It was like something in a book, only worse than any book that she had ever read. Sometimes she felt as if her brain were being affected by the sheer horror of it.