Martie’s trunk came to Sally’s house the next morning, unaccompanied by message or note, and three days later Martie wrote her mother a long letter from a theatrical boarding-house in Geary Street, sending a copy of the marriage certificate of Martha Salisbury Monroe to Edward Vincent Tenney in Saint Patrick’s Church, San Francisco, and observing with a touch of pride that “my husband” was now rehearsing for an engagement of seven weeks at sixty dollars a week.  There was no answer.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

For days it was her one triumphant thought.  She was married!  She was splendidly and unexpectedly a wife.  And her life partner was no mere Monroe youth, and her home was not merely one of the old, familiar Monroe cottages.  She was the wife of a rising actor, and she lived in the biggest city of the State!

Martie exulted innocently and in secret.  She reviewed the simple fact again and again.  The two Monroe girls were married.  A dimple would deepen in her cheek, a slow smile tug at her lips, when she thought of it.  She told Wallace, in her simple childish way, that she had never really expected to be married; she thought that she would like to go back to Monroe for a visit, and let her old friends see the plain gold ring on her big, white hand.

Everything in Martie’s life, up to this point, had helped her to believe that marriage was the final step in any woman’s experience.  A girl was admired, was desired, and was married, if she was, humanly speaking, a success.  If she was not admired, if no one asked her in marriage, she was a failure.  This was the only test.

Martie’s thoughts never went on to the years that followed marriage, the experiences and lessons; these were all lost in the golden glow that surrounded the step safely accomplished.  That the years between thirty and fifty are as long as the years between ten and thirty, never occurred to her.  With the long, dull drag of her mother’s life before her eyes, she never had thought that Rose’s life, that Sally’s life, as married women, could ever be long and dull.  They were married—­doubt and surmise and hope were over.  Lydia and Miss Fanny were not married.  Therefore, Rose and Sally and Martie had an obvious advantage over Lydia and Fanny.

It was a surprise to her to find life placidly proceeding here in this strange apartment in Geary Street, as if all the world had not stopped moving and commenced again.  The persons she met called her “Mrs. Bannister” with no visible thrill.  Nobody seemed surprised when she and the big actor quietly went into their room at night and shut the door.