With almost all the women of Monroe, Lydia now considered Martie’s life a thing accomplished, and boldly accomplished.  To leave home, to marry, to have children in a strange city, to be honorably widowed and to return to her father’s home, and rear her child in seclusion and content; this was more than fell to the lot of many women.  Lydia listened with actual shudders to Martie’s casually dropped revelations.

“This John Dryden that I told you about, Lyd—­the man who wrote the play that failed—­was anxious for me to go on with the Curley boarding-house,” Martie said one day, “and sometimes now I think I should have done so.”

“Good heavens!” Lydia, smoothing the thin old blankets on Martie’s wide, flat bed, stopped aghast.  “But why should you—­Pa is more than willing to have you here!”

“I know, darling.  But what really deterred me was not so much Pa’s generosity, but the fact that I would have had to lease the property for three years; George Curley wanted to be rid of the responsibility.  And to really make the thing a success, I should have had the adjoining house, too; that would have been about four thousand rent.”

“Four thousand—­Martie, you would have been crazy!”

Martie, tinkling pins into a saucer on the bureau, opening the upper drawer to sweep her brush and comb into it, and jerking the limp linen scarf straight, only smiled and shrugged in answer.  She had been widowed three months, and already reviving energy and self-confidence were running in her veins.  Already she realized that it had been a mistake to accept her father’s hospitality in the first panic of being dependent.  However graceful and dignified her position was to the outsider’s eye, in this old house in the sunken block, she knew now that Pa was really unable to offer her anything more than a temporary relief from financial worry, and that her chances of finding employment in Monroe as compared to New York were about one to ten.

Malcolm Monroe had been deeply involved for several years in “the firm” by which term he and Len referred to their real estate business together.  A large tract of grassy brown meadow, south of the town, had been in his possession for thirty years; it was only with the opening of the new “Monroe’s Grove” that he had realized its possibilities, or rather that Len had realized them.

Len had held one or two office positions in Monroe unsatisfactorily before his twentieth year, and then had persuaded his father to send him to Berkeley, to the State University.  Ma and Lydia had been proud of their under-graduate for one brief year, then Len was back again, disgusted with study.  After a few months of drifting and experimenting, the brilliant idea of developing the old south tract into building sites had occurred to Len, and presently his father was also persuaded that here was a splendid opportunity.  A little office on Main Street was rented, and its window embellished with the words “Own a Home in the Monroe Estates.”  Len really worked violently for a time; he rode his bicycle back and forth tirelessly.  He married, and moved out into the Estates, and he personally superintended the work that went on there.  Streets and plots were laid out, trees planted, the fresh muddy roads were edged with pyramids of brown sewer pipes.