“What has become of Dr. Cooper?” Martie felt justified in asking.

“He lost all the practice he ever had, they say,” Mrs. Baker said viciously.  “And good enough for him, too!  His wife won’t even see him, and he lives at some boarding-house; and serve him right!”

“And Jack’s book such a success!” Adele said, widening her eyes at Martie.  “Do you ever see him?”

“He’s got a great friend in Dean Silver, the novelist,” Martie answered composedly.  “I believe they’re abroad.”

“The idea!” Adele said lifelessly.  She was playing with her bracelets now, and looked about her in an aimless way.

“Well, if this little girl has any sense she’ll let the past be the past,” remarked the optimistic Mrs. Baker.  “There’s a fellow out our way, Joe Chase; he’s got a cattle ranch.  You never heard of him?  He’s a di’mond in the rough, if you ask me, but he’s been crazy about Adele ever since she first visited me.  He’d give her anything in God’s world.”

“But I think I’d die of loneliness winters!” Adele said, with the smile of a petted child.

So there was a third man eager to sacrifice his life to her, Martie marvelled.  Adele would consider herself a martyr if she succumbed to the wiles of the rough diamond; she would puzzle and distress him in his ranch-house; she would Fret and exact and complain.  Probably one of the Swedish farmers thereabout could give him a daughter who would make him an infinitely better wife, and bear him children, and worship him blindly.  But no; he must yearn for this neurotic, abnormal little creature, with her ugly history and her barren brain and body.

“Isn’t it funny how unlucky I am, Martie?” Adele asked at parting.  “If you’ll tell me why one woman has to have so much bad luck, and others just sail along on the top of the wave, I’ll be obliged to you!” She came close to Martie, her faded, bitter little face flushing suddenly.  “Now this Mrs. Cooper,” she said in a low tone, “her father was a shoe manufacturer, and left her half a million dollars.  Of course, it’s a snap for her to say she’ll do this, and say she’ll do that!  She says it’s for the children she refuses the divorce, but the real reason is she wants him back.  She can live in New York—­”

Adele’s voice trailed off disconsolately.  Martie felt a genuine pang of sympathy for the unhappy little creature whose one claim had been of sex, and who had made her claim so badly.

“Write me now and then!” she said warmly.

“Oh, I will!” Adele stretched up to kiss the taller woman, and Mrs. Baker kissed her, too.  Martie went away smiling; over all its waste and suffering life was amusing, after all.

Would John, with his irregular smile and his sea-blue eyes and his reedy voice, also come back into her life some day?  She could not say.  The threads of human intercourse were tangled enough to make living a blind business at best, and she had deliberately tangled the web that held them even more deeply than life had done.  Before he himself was back from long wandering, before he learned that she was in the city, and that there had been no second marriage, months, perhaps years, must go by.