Somebody brought her Jim, sweet and sleepy, and he subsided in her lap.  Len’s wife sank into a neighbouring chair, to express worried hopes that the March baby would be a boy, a male in the Monroe line at last.  Rose fluttered near, with pleasant plans for a dinner party.  Martie’s thought were with a slim, dark-blue book, safe in her bureau drawer.

She wrote John immediately.  There was no answer, but she realized that the weeks that went on so quietly in Monroe were bringing him rapidly to fame and fortune.

“Mary Beatrice” was an instantaneous success.  It was not quite poetry, not quite drama, not quite history.  But its combination of the three took the fancy, first of the critics, then of the public.  It was read, quoted, and discussed more than any other book of the year.  Martie found John’s photograph in all the literary magazines, and saw his name everywhere.  Interviews with him frequently stared at her from unexpected places, and flattering prophecies of his future work were sounded from all sides.  Three special performances of “Mary Beatrice,” and then three more, and three after that, were given in New York, and literary clubs everywhere took up the book seriously for study.

Well, Martie thought, reviewing the matter, it was not like one’s dreams, but it was life, this curious success that had come to the husband of a woman like Adele, the odd, inarticulate little clerk in a furniture store.  She wondered if it had come in time to save the divorce, wondered where John was living, what change this extraordinary event had made in his life.

Her own share in it came to seem unreal, as all the old life was unreal.  Gradually, what Monroe did and thought and felt began to seem the real standard and the old life the false.  Martie agreed with Lydia that the little Eastman girl had a prettier voice than any she had ever heard in New York; she agreed with Rose that the Woman’s Club was really more up-to-date than it was possible for a club to be in the big Eastern city.

“I know New York,” smiled Rose, “and of course, I love it.  Rod and I have been there twice, and we do have the best times!  And I admit that Tiffany’s and the big shops and so on, well, of course, they’re wonderful!  We stayed there almost three weeks the last time, and we just went every moment of the time—­”

Martie, leaning on the desk before her and smiling vaguely, was not listening.  The other woman’s words had evoked a sudden memory of the early snows and the lights in the Mall, of the crashing elevated trains with chestnut-sellers’ lights blowing beneath them, of summer dawns, when the city woke to the creeping tide of heat, and of autumn afternoons, when motor cars began to crowd the Avenue, and leaves drifted—­drifted—­in the Park.  To Rose she answered duly:  “You must have had great fun!” But to herself she said:  “Ah, you don’t know my New York!”

CHAPTER III