One summer day Lydia saw her absorbed in the closely written sheets of a long letter from New York.

“It’s from Mr. Dryden, my friend there.”  Martie said, in answer to her mild look of questioning.  “Don’t you remember that I told you he had written a play that no manager would produce?”

“You didn’t tell me, dear,” Lydia amended, darning industriously.

“Oh, yes, I did, Lyddy!  I remember telling you!”

“No, dear, perhaps you thought you did,” Lydia persisted.

“Oh, well!  Anyway, I wrote and suggested that he try to get it published instead, and my dear—­it’s to be published next month.  Isn’t that glorious?”

“That is all worn under the arms,” Lydia murmured over an old waist that had been for months in her sewing basket, “I believe I will cut off the buttons and give it to the poor!”

“The old idiot!” Martie mused over her letter.

“Does his wife encourage this writing, Martie?”

“Adele?  She isn’t with him now at all.  She’s left him, in fact.  I believe she wants a divorce.”

“Oh?” Lydia commented, in a peculiar tone.

“He wrote me that some weeks ago,” Martie explained, suddenly flushing.  “She was a queer, unhappy sort of woman.  She and this doctor of hers had some sort of affair, and the outcome was that she simply went to friends, and wrote John a hysterical girly-girly sort of letter—­”

“John?”

“Mr. Dryden, that is.”

“He must be crushed and heartbroken,” Lydia said emphatically.

“Well, no, he isn’t,” Martie said innocently.  “He isn’t like other people.  If she wants a divorce—­John won’t mind awfully.  He’s really—­really unusual.”

“He must be,” Lydia said witheringly, and trembling a little with excitement, “to let his own wife leave him while he writes letters asking the advice of a—­a—­another woman who is recently—­recently widowed!”

Martie glanced at her, smiled a little, shrugged her shoulders, and calmly re-read her letter.

Lydia resumed her work, a flush on her cheeks.

“He can’t have much respect for you, Martie,” she said quietly, after a busy silence.

Martie looked up, startled.

“John can’t?  Oh, but Lyddy, you don’t know him!  He’s such an innocent goose; he absolutely depends upon me!  Why, fancy, he’s the man who wanted me to open the boarding-house so that he and his wife could live there—­he’s as simple as that!”

“As simple as what?” Lydia asked with her deadly directness.

“Well—­I mean—­that if there were anything—­wrong in his feeling for me—­” Martie floundered.

“Oh, Martie, Martie, Martie, I tremble for you!” Lydia said sadly.  “A married man, and you a married woman!  My dear, can’t you see how far you’ve drifted from your own better self to be able to laugh about it?”

“You goose!” Martie kissed the cool, lifeless cheek before she ran upstairs with her letter.  John’s straight-forward sentences kept recurring to her mind through many days.  His letter seemed to bring a bracing breath of the big city.  A day or two later she and Teddy chanced to be held in mid-street while the big Eastern passenger train thundered by, and she shut her fingers on John’s letter in her pocket, and said eagerly, confidently, “Oh, New York!  I wish I was going back!”