Rose Ransome, the pretty, neat little daughter of a pretty, neat little widow, was cultivated eagerly by the Monroes, and patronized kindly by the Frost and Parker girls.  She had lived all of her twenty years in Monroe, and was too conscientious and amiable to snub the girls supposedly beneath her, and too merry, ladylike, and entertaining to be quite ignored by the richer group.  So she brightly, obligingly, and gratefully lunched and drove, read and walked, and practised music with May and Ida and Florence, when they wanted her, and when they did not, or when Eastern friends visited them, or there was for some reason no empty seat in the surrey, she turned back to the company of Grace Hawkes and of Sally and Martie Monroe.  Rose admitted frankly to her mother that with the latter group she had “more fun,” but that with her more elevated friends she enjoyed, of course, “nicer times.”  Politically she steered a diplomatic middle course between the two, implying, with equal readiness, that she only associated with the poor Monroes because Uncle Ben made her, or that she accepted invitations from the Frost and Parker faction simply to be amiable.

Sally Monroe, innocent, simple, unexacting at twenty-one, really believed Rose to be the sweetly frank and artless person she seemed, but Martie, two years younger, had her times of absolutely detesting Rose.  Sally was never jealous, but Martie burned with a fierce young jealousy of all life:  of Rose, with her dainty frocks and her rich friends, her curly hair and her violin; of Florence Frost’s riding horse; of Ida Parker’s glib French; of her own brother, Leonard Monroe, with his male independence; of the bare-armed women who leaped on the big, flat-backed horses in the circus; of the very Portuguese children who rode home asleep of a summer afternoon, in fragrant loads of alfalfa.

To-day she was vaguely smarting at Grace’s news:  Grace was going to work.  She, like the Monroe girls, had often discussed the possibilities of this step, but opportunities were not many, and the idle, pleasant years drifted by with no change.  But Ellie Hawkes, Grace’s big sister, who had kept books in the box factory for three years, was to be married now; a step down for Ellie—­for her “friend” was only Terry Castle, a brawny, ignorant giant employed by the Express Company—­but a step up for Grace.  She would be a wage-earner; her pretty, weak face grew animated at the thought, and her shrill voice more shrill.

Martie Monroe had no real desire to work in the box factory, to walk daily the ugly half mile that lay between it and her home, to join the ranks of toilers that filed through the poorer region of town every morning.  But like all growing young things she felt a desperate, undefined need.  She could not know that self-expression is as necessary to natures like hers as breath is to young bodies.  She could only grope and yearn and struggle in the darkness of her soul.