“Well, I guess that’s so, too!” he said quickly with an answering sigh.  “What was the—­the cause?” he asked delicately.  “He was a big, strong fellow.  I remember him quite well; friend of Rodney’s.”

He told her circumstantially, in return for her brief confidences, of his wife’s death.  How she had not been well, and how she had refused the regular dinner on a certain night, first mentioned as “the Tuesday,” and then corrected to “the Wednesday,” and had asked Polly to boil her two eggs, and then had not wanted them, either.  With loving sorrow he had remembered it all; frank tears came to his eyes, and Martie liked him for them.

When they parted, he walked with her to the Bank door, and asked her, if she was interested in roses, to let him drive her up some day to see his.

“An old-fashioned garden—­an old-fashioned garden!” he said, smiling from the doorway.  Martie, pleasantly stirred, went back to the Library, to put her rose in water and congratulate herself upon her mission.

“Poor Clifford!  He will never get over his wife’s death!” Lydia said that evening.  “Where’d you meet him, Mart?”

“I deposited some money in the Bank,” Martie said truthfully.  “He’s awfully pleasant, I think.”

Lydia paid no further attention.  She presently went back to another topic.  “Nelson Prout said he was going to take it up with the Principal.  He says there’s no earthly reason in the world why Dorothy shouldn’t have passed this Christmas.  Elsa told me Dorothy has been crying ever since and they’re worried to death about her—­”

Lydia suspected no treachery.  What Len and Pa had settled was settled.  She felt that Martie was merely easing her indignation when the younger sister spent several evenings attempting to write an article on the subject of economic independence for women.  Martie had tried to write years ago; it was a safe and ladylike amusement.

“What’s it all about?” Lydia asked.

“Oh, it’s practically an appeal to give girls the same chance that boys have!”

Lydia smiled.

“But don’t they have it?  Girls don’t want it, that’s all.”

“Neither do boys, Lyd.”

“So your idea would be to force something they didn’t want on girls, just because it’s forced on boys?” Lydia said, quietly triumphant.

Martie, looking up from her scratched sheets, smiled and blinked at her sister for a few seconds.

“Exactly!” she said then, pleasantly.

She finished the little article, and called it “Give Her A Job!” It was only what she had attempted to express during her first return visit to Monroe years ago; during those days and nights of fretting when the thought of Golda White had ridden her troubled thoughts like an evil dream.  Later, she had re-written the article, just before Wallace’s return from long absence to New York.  Now she wrote it again:  it was a relief to have it finally polished and finished, and sent away in the mail.  She had never before despatched it so indifferently.