The first few days of exploration were somewhat affected by the fact that Wallace had almost no money; yet they were glorious days, filled with laughter and joy.  The heat of summer had no terrors for Martie as yet, she was all enthusiasm and eagerness.  They ate butter cakes and baked apples at Child’s, they bought fruit and ice cream bricks and walked along eating them.  All New York was eating, and panting, and gasping in the heat.  They went to Liberty Island, and climbed the statue, and descended into the smothering subway to be rushed to the Bronx Zoo.

And swiftly the city claimed Martie’s heart and mind and body, swiftly she partook of its freedom, of its thousand little pleasures for the poor, of its romance and pathos and ugliness and beauty.  Even to the seasoned New Yorkers she met, she seemed to hold some key to what was strange and significant.

Italian women, musing bareheaded and overburdened in the cars, Rabbis with their patriarchal beards, slim saleswomen who wore masses of marcelled curls and real Irish lace, she watched them all.  She drank in the music of the Park concerts, she dreamed in the libraries, she eagerly caught the first brassy mutter of the thunder storms.

“If five million other people can make a living here, can’t we?” she amused Wallace by asking with spirit.

“There’s something in that!” he assured her.

A day came when Wallace shaved and dressed with unusual care, and went to see Dawson.  Hovering about him anxiously at his toilet, his wife had reminded him bravely that if Dawson failed, there were other managers; Dawson was not the only one!  The great thing was that he was here, ready for them.

Dawson, however, did not fail him.  Wallace came back buoyantly with the contract.  He had been less than a week in New York, and look at it!  Seventy-five dollars a week in a new play.  Rehearsals were to start at once.

The joy that she had always felt awaited her in New York was Martie’s now!  She told Wallace that she had known that New York meant success.  She went to his rehearsals, feeling herself a proud part of the whole enterprise, keenly appreciative of the theatre atmosphere.  When he went away with his company in late August, Martie saw him off cheerfully, moved to a smaller room, and began to plan for his return, and for the baby.  She was in love with life—­ she wrote Sally.

“You’re lucky our climate don’t affect you no more than it does,” observed Mrs. Curley comfortably.  “I suffer considerable from the heat, myself; but then, to tell you the honest truth, I’m fleshy.”

“I like it!” Martie answered buoyantly.  “The thunder storms are delicious!  Why, at home the gardens are as dry as bones, now, and look at Central Park—­as green as ever.  And I love the hurdy-gurdies and the awnings and the elevated trains and the street markets!”

“I like the city,” said the old woman, with a New Yorker’s approval of this view.  “My daughter wants me to go down and open a house in Asbury; she has a little summer place there, with a garage and all.  But I tell her there’s almost nobody in the house now, and we get a good draf’ through the rooms.  It’s not so bad!”