How did they come to be talking of dancing?  Martie could not afterward remember.  Rodney had a visit promised from a college friend, and wondered rather disconsolately what might be arranged to amuse him.  Fortnightly dances—­that was the thing; they ought to have Friday Fortnightlies.

The very word fired the girl.  She heard the whine of violins, the click of fans, the light shuffle of satin-clad feet.  Her eyes saw dazzling lights, shifting colours, in the dull September twilight.

“You could have one at your house,” Rodney suggested.

“Of course we could!  Our rooms are immense,” Martie agreed eagerly.

“To begin—­say the last Friday in October!” the boy said.  “You look up the date, and we’ll get together on the lists!”

Get together on the lists!  Martie’s heart closed over the phrase with a sort of spasm of pleasure.  She and Rodney conferring—­ arranging!  The bliss—­the dignity of it!  She would have considered anything, promised anything.

Grace was gone now, and generous little Sally still ahead of them in the shadows.  Martie said a quick, laughing good-night, and ran to join her sister just before Sally opened the side gate.  It was now quite dark.

The two girls crossed the sunken garden where clumps of flowers bloomed dimly under the dark old trees, gave one apprehensive glance at the big house, which showed here and there a dully lighted window, and fled noiselessly in at the side door.  They ran through a wide, bare, unaired hallway, and up a long flight of unlighted stairs that were protected over their dark carpeting by a worn brown oilcloth.

Sally, and Martie breathless, entered an enormous bedroom, shabbily and scantily furnished.  The outline of a large walnut bedstead was visible in the gloom, and the dark curtains that screened two bay windows.  Across the room by a wide, dark bureau, a single gas jet on a jointed brass arm had been drawn out close to the mirror, and by its light a slender woman of twenty-seven or eight was straightening her hair.  Not combing or brushing it, for the Monroe girls always combed their hair and coiled it when they got up in the morning, and took it down when they went to bed at night.  Between times they only “straightened” it.

As the younger girls came in, and flung their hats on the bed, their sister turned on them reproachfully.

“Martie, mama’s furious!” she said.  “And I do think it’s perfectly terrible, you and Sally running round town at all hours like this.  It’s after six o’clock!”

“I can’t help it if it is!” Martie said cheerfully.  “Pa home?”

She asked the all-important question with more trepidation than she showed.  Both she and Sally hung anxiously on the reply.

“No; Pa was to come on the four-eleven, and either he missed it, or else something’s kept him down town,” Lydia said in her flat, gentle voice.  “Len’s not home either ...”