After a while he slept heavily.  The afternoon was brassy hot.  Women manipulated creaking clotheslines across the long double row of backyards; the day died on a long, gasping twilight.  Martie let Teddy go to the candy store for ten cents’ worth of ice cream for his supper.  She made herself iced tea, and deliberately forced herself to read.  To-night she would not think.  After a while she wrote her letter of regret to George Curley.

The situation was far from desperate, after all.  Wallace had a headache the next day, but on the day after that he shaved and dressed carefully, assured his wife that this experience should be the last of its type, and began to look for an engagement.  He had some money, and he insisted upon buying her a thin, dark gown, loose and cool.  He carried Teddy off for whole afternoons, leaving Martie to doze, read, and rest; and learning that she still had a bank account of something more than three hundred dollars—­left from poker games and from her old bank account—­she engaged a stupid, good-natured coloured girl to do the heavy work.  Isabeau Eato was willing and strong, and for three dollars a week she did an unbelievable amount of drudgery.  Martie felt herself fortunate, and listened to the crash of dishes, the running of water, and the swish of Isabeau’s broom with absolute satisfaction.

One broiling afternoon she was trying to read in the darkened dining room.  Heat was beating against the prostrate city in metallic waves, but since noon there had been occasional distant flashes toward the west, and faint rumblings that predicted the coming storm.  In an hour or two the streets would be awash, and white hats and flimsy gowns flying toward shelter; meanwhile, there was only endurance.  She could only breathe the motionless leaden air, smell the dry, stale odours of the house, and listen to the thundering drays and cars in the streets.

Wallace had gone to Yonkers to see a moving picture manager; Isabeau had taken Teddy with her on a trip to the Park.  Sitting back in a deep chair, with her back to the dazzling light of the window, Martie closed her book, shut her eyes, and fell into a reverie.  Expense, pain, weakness, helplessness; she dreaded them all.  She dreaded the doctor, the hospital, the brisk, indifferent nurses; she hated above all the puzzled realization that all this cost to her was so wasted; Wallace was not sorry for the child’s coming, nor was she; that was all.  No one was glad.  No one praised her for the slow loss of days and nights, for dependence, pain, and care.  Her children might live to comfort her; they might not.  She had been no particular comfort to her own father—­her own mother—­

Tears slipped through her closed lids, and for a moment her lips quivered.  She struggled half-angrily for self-control, and opened her book.

“Martie?” said a voice from the doorway.  She looked up to see John Dryden standing there.

The sight of the familiar crooked smile, and the half-daring, half-bashful eyes, stirred her heart with keen longing; she needed friendship, sympathy, understanding so desperately!  She clung eagerly to his hands.