Women were coming and going on the altar, trimming it with odorous green for Christmas.  There was a pungent smell of evergreen in the air.  About the confessionals there was a constant shuffle, whispering and stirring; radiators hissed and clanked, the big doors creaked and swung windily.

Sally and her whispering tribe were just in front of them; presently they all went out into the cold, and across a bare yard to the lights and warmth and noise and music of the Sodality Hall.  Sally saw that Martie had been crying, and when they were seated together in one of the rows of chairs against the wall, with their laps full of children’s coats, she touched the hidden hurt.

“Martie, dearest, I’m so sorry!”

“I know!” Martie blinked and managed a smile.

“I’ll be glad for you when this first Christmas is over!” Sally said earnestly.

Martie’s answering look was full of gratitude:  she thought it strangely touching to see the blooming little mother deliberately try to bring her gay Christmas mood into tune with sorrow and loss.  Sally’s beautiful Elizabeth was one of the Christmas angels in the play to-night, and Sally’s pride was almost too great to bear.  Billy was sturdily dashing about selling popcorn balls, and Jim was staggering to and fro flirting with admiring Sodality girls.  The young Hawkeses were at their handsome best, and women on all sides were congratulating Sally.

What could Sally dream, Martie mused, of a freezing Eastern city packed under dirty snow, of bitter poverty, of a tiny, gold-crowned girl in a shabby dressing-gown, of a coaster wrapped in wet paper, and delivered in a dark, bare hall?  Sally’s serene destiny lay here, away from the damp, close heat under which milk poisoned and babies wilted, away from the icy cold that caught shuddering flesh and blood under its solid pall.  These friendly, chattering women were Sally’s world, these problems of school and rent and food were Sally’s problems.

But Martie knew now that she was not of Monroe, that she must go back.  She was not Sally, she was not Rose; she had earned her entry into a higher school.  Those Eastern years were not wasted, she must go on now, she must go on—­to what?—­to what?

And with New York her thoughts were suddenly with John, and Sally, glancing anxiously at her, saw that she was smiling.  Martie did not notice the look:  she was far away.  She saw the Christmas tree, and the surging children, through a haze of dreams.

Mysterious, enviable, unattainable—­thought the Sodality girls, eying the black-clad figure, with its immaculate touches of white at wrists and throat.  Mrs. Bannister had run away with an actor and had lived in New York, and was a widow, they reminded each other, and thrilled.  She never dreamed that they made her a heroine and a model, quoted her, loitered into the Library to be enslaved afresh by her kind, unsmiling advice.  She felt herself far from the earliest beginnings of real achievement:  to them, as to herself ten years ago, she was a person romantic and exceptional—­a somebody in Monroe!