But these things might all have transpired without touching Martie’s own life directly.  She might still, in many ways, have been the dreaming, ambitious, helpless girl of seven years ago.  Sometimes the realization of all she had endured came to her with an odd sense of shock.  She would glance down at her thin hand, in its black cuff, and fall into deep musing, her face grave and weary.  Or she would call Teddy from his play, and hold his warm little body close, staring at him with a look that always made the child uneasy.  Third Avenue, barred with sun and shade, in the early summer mornings; Broadway on a snowy winter afternoon with the theatre crowd streaming up and down, spring and babies taking possession of the parks—­were these all a dream?

No; she had gained something in the hard years; she saw that more and more.  Her very widowhood to Monroe had the stamp of absolute respectability.  Even Pa was changed toward her; or was it that she was changed toward him?  However caused, in their relationship there was a fundamental change.

Pa had been a figure of power and tyranny seven years ago.  Now he seemed to Martie only an unreasonable, unattractive old man, thwarted in his old age in everything his heart desired.  Lydia was still tremblingly filial in her attitude toward Pa, but Martie at once assumed the maternal.  She scolded him, listened to him, and dictated to him, and he liked it.  Martie had never loved him as Lydia did; she had defied and disobeyed and deserted him, yet he transferred his allegiance to her now, and clung to her helplessly.

He liked to have her walk down to his office beside him in the mornings, in her plain black.  While they walked he pointed out various pieces of property, and told her how cheaply they had been sold forty years ago.  The whole post-office block had gone for seven hundred dollars, the hotel site had been Mason’s cow-yard!  Old man Sark had lived there, and had refused to put black on his house when Lincoln was assassinated.

“And didn’t he go to jail for that, Pa?”

“Yes, ma’am, he did!”

“But you—­”

“I was in jail, too.”  Malcolm Monroe would chuckle under his now gray moustache that was yellowed with tobacco stains.  “Yes, sir, I rounded up some of the boys, the Twentyonesters, we called ourselves, and we led a riot ’round this town!  The ringleaders were arrested, but that was merely a form—­merely a form!”

“You must have been a terror, Pa.”

“Well—­well, I had a good deal of your grandmother’s spirit!  And I suppose they rather looked to me to set the pace—­”

Smiling, they would go along in the sunlight, past the little homes where babies had been turned out into grassy yards, past the straggling stables and the smithy, and the fire-house, and the office of the weekly Zeus.  There was more than one garage in Monroe now and the squared noses of Ford cars were at home everywhere.  Mallon’s Hardware Emporium, the Five-and-Ten-Cent Store, still with its pillars of twisted handkerchiefs, Mason and White’s—­how familiar they were!  And the old Bank, with its wide windows and double roller shades was familiar, too.  Martie learned that the Bank had duly worn black a year or two ago for kindly old Colonel Frost; his name had been obliterated from the big window, and Clifford Frost was vice-president now.