But she developed steadily.  As she grew skilful in managing her little house, she also grew in the art of managing her husband and herself.  She became clever at avoiding causes of disagreement; she listened, nodded, agreed, with a boiling heart, and had the satisfaction of having Martin’s viewpoint veer the next day, or the next hour, to meet her own secret conviction.  Martin’s opinion, she told herself wearily, as she swept and cooked and marketed busily, didn’t matter anyhow.  He would rage and storm at his superiors, he would threaten and brood, and then it would all be forgotten, time after time after time.  Silent, absent-minded, looking closely at a burn upon her smooth arm or pleating her checked apron, Cherry would sit opposite him at his late lunch.

“I suppose you don’t agree with me?” he would interrupt himself to ask scowlingly.

“Mart—­” The innocent blue eyes would be raised vaguely.  “I don’t know anything about it, dear.  If Mr. Taylor—­”

“Well, you know what I tell you, don’t you?”

“Yes, dear.  But—­”

“For God’s sake don’t call me dear when you—­”

“Mart!” Her dignity always rose in arms.  “Please don’t get excited.”

“Well!” His tone would be modified, as the appetizing little meal was dispatched.  “But Lord, you do make me so mad, sitting there criticizing me—­I can always tell when you’re in sympathy with me--my Lord, I wish you had to go up against these fellows sometimes--” The grumbling voice would go on and on; Cherry would pause at the door, carrying out plates, to have him finish a phrase; would nod sympathizingly as she set his dessert before him.  But her soul was like some living thing spun into a cocoon, hearing the sounds of life only vaguely, interested in them not at all.

Martin seemed satisfied, and all their little world accepted her as a matter of course.  Pretty little Mrs. Lloyd went every morning into the Company Store as the only store at the mine was called, and smiled over her shopping; she stopped perhaps at the office to speak to her husband; she met some other woman wheeling a baby up to the cottages, and they gossiped together.  She and her husband dined and played cards now and then with a neighbour and his wife, and they gave dinners in return, when the men praised every dish extravagantly, and the woman laughed at their greedy enthusiasms.  Like the other women, she had her small domestic ambitions; Mrs. Brown wanted a meat-chopper; Mrs. White’s one desire was to have a curly maple bedroom set; Mrs. Lloyd wanted a standing mahogany lamp for the sitting room.

But under it all Cherry knew that something young and irresponsible and confident in her had been killed.  She never liked to think of the valley, of the fogs and the spokes of sunlight under the redwood aisles, of Alix and the dogs and the dreamy evenings by the fire.  And especially she did not like to think of that eighteenth birthday, and herself thrilling and ecstatic because the strange young man from Mrs. North’s had stared at her, in her sticky apron, with so new and disturbing a smile in his eyes.