Cherry had a flat now in Red Creek “Park.”  It differed from an apartment because it had no elevator, no janitor, no steam heat.  These things were neither known nor needed in the crude mining town; the flat building itself was considered a rather questionable innovation.  It was a wooden building, three stories high, with bay windows.  There were empty lots each side of it, but the sidewalls were on property boundaries, and had windows only where the building jutted in, and there was a small gate, and a narrow cement walk pressing tightly on one side.  Cherry had watched this building going up, and had thought it everything desirable.  She liked the clean kitchen, all fresh white woodwork, tiles, and nickelplate, and she liked the big closets and the gas-log.  She had worried herself almost sick with fear that she would not get this wonderful place, and finally paid twenty-five dollars for the first month’s rent with a fast-beating heart.  She had the centre floor.

From her windows she looked down at the “Park.”  All the other buildings were wooden bungalows, in many places the sidewalks were wooden, too, and the centre of the street was deep black dust in summer and churned black mud in the winter.  The little houses gushed electric light, which was cheap; the street itself was unlighted.

But after the excitement of moving in died away, she hated the place.  She had enough money to hire a maid now, and she had a succession of slatternly, independent young women in her kitchen, but she found her freedom strangely flat.  She detested the women of Red Creek.  Cherry went to market, to buy prunes and lard and apples and matches again, but this took little time, and otherwise she had nothing to do.

Now and then a play, straight from “a triumphant year on Broadway” came to town for one night; then Martin took his wife, and they bowed to half the men and women in the house, lamenting as they streamed out into the sharp night air that Red Creek did not see more such productions.

The effect of these plays was to make Cherry long vaguely for the stage; she really did not enjoy them for themselves.  But they helped her to visualize Eastern cities, lighted streets, restaurants full of lights and music, beautiful women fitly gowned.  After one of these performances she would not leave her flat for several days, but would sit dreaming over the thought of herself in the heroine’s role.

One day she had a letter from Alix; it gave her a heartache, she hardly knew why.  She began to dream of her own home, of the warm, sweet little valley whose breezes were like wine, of Tamalpais wreathed in fog, and of the ridges where buttercups and poppies powdered a child’s shoes with gold and silver dust.  Alix had been ill, and she and Peter had been away—­a few brief weeks—­to Honolulu and return.  Cherry crushed the letter in her hand; she knew suddenly that she had always been jealous of Alix.  Alix wrote gaily that she