She was nineteen, a tall, strong girl, already fully developed, and handsome in a rather dull and heavy way.  Her hands and feet were beautifully made, her hair, although neglected, of a wonderful silky bronze, and her skin naturally of the clear creamy type that sometimes accompanies such hair.  But Martie ruined her skin by injudicious eating; she could not resist sweets; natural indolence, combined with the idle life she led, helped to make her too fat.  Now and then, in the express office, in the afternoon, the girls got on the big freight scales, and this was always a mortification to Martie.  Terry Castle and Joe Hawkes would laugh as they adjusted the weights, and Martie always tried to laugh, too, but she did not think it funny.  Martie might have seemed to her world merely a sweet, big, good-natured tomboy, growing into an eager, amusing, ignorant young woman, too fond of sleeping and eating.

But there was another Martie—­a sensitive, ambitious Martie—­who despised idleness, dependence, and inaction; who longed to live a thousand lives—­to conquer all the world; a Martie who was one day a great singer, one day a wartime nurse, one day a millionaire’s beautiful bride, the mother of five lovely children, all carefully named.  She would waken from her dreams almost bewildered, blinking at Sally or at her mother in the surprised fashion that sometimes made folk call Martie stupid, humbly enough she thought of herself as stupid, too.  She never suspected that she was really “dreaming true,” that the power and the glory lay waiting for the touch of her heart and hand and brain.  She never suspected that she was to Rose and Grace and Sally what a clumsy young swan would be in a flock of bustling and competent ducks.  Martie did not know, yet, where her kingdom lay, how should she ever dream that she was to find it?

Rose was going back to stay with her cousin in Berkeley to-morrow, it was understood, and so had to get home early this afternoon.  Rose, as innocent as a butterfly of ambition or of the student’s zeal, had finished her first year in the State University and was to begin her second to-morrow.

Monroe’s shabby Main Street seemed less interesting than ever when Rose had tripped away.  A gusty breeze was blowing fitfully, whisking bits of straw and odds and ends of paper about.  The watering cart went by, leaving a cool wake of shining mud.  Here and there a surrey, loaded with stout women in figured percales, and dusty, freckled children, started on its trip from Main Street back to some outlying ranch.

As the three girls, arms linked, loitered across the square, Dr. Ben Scott—­who was Rose Ransome’s mother’s cousin and was regarded as an uncle—­came out of the Court House and walked toward his buggy.  The dreaming white mare roused as she heard his voice, and the old brown-and-white setter sprang into the seat beside him.

“Howdy, girls!” said the old man, his big loose figure bulging grotesquely over the boundaries of the seat.  “Father pretty well?”