Martie The Unconquered | Page 5

much to
this fragrant, sun-washed table land as did wheat and grapes and apple
trees. Monroe came to laugh at "old Monroe's" pigheadedness. He
fought the town on every question for improvements, as it came up.
The bill for pavements, the bill for sewerage, the bill for street lights,
the high school bill, found in him an enemy as the years went by. He
denounced these innovations bitterly. When the level of Main Street
was raised four feet, "old Monroe" almost went out of his senses, and
the home site, gloomily shut in now by immense trees, and a whole
block square, was left four feet below the street level, so that there must
be built three or four wooden steps at all the gates. The Monroe girls
resented this peculiarity of their home, but never said so to their father.
Rose Ransome, the pretty, neat little daughter of a pretty, neat little
widow, was cultivated eagerly by the Monroes, and patronized kindly
by the Frost and Parker girls. She had lived all of her twenty years in
Monroe, and was too conscientious and amiable to snub the girls
supposedly beneath her, and too merry, ladylike, and entertaining to be
quite ignored by the richer group. So she brightly, obligingly, and
gratefully lunched and drove, read and walked, and practised music
with May and Ida and Florence, when they wanted her, and when they
did not, or when Eastern friends visited them, or there was for some
reason no empty seat in the surrey, she turned back to the company of
Grace Hawkes and of Sally and Martie Monroe. Rose admitted frankly
to her mother that with the latter group she had "more fun," but that
with her more elevated friends she enjoyed, of course, "nicer times."
Politically she steered a diplomatic middle course between the two,
implying, with equal readiness, that she only associated with the poor
Monroes because Uncle Ben made her, or that she accepted invitations
from the Frost and Parker faction simply to be amiable.
Sally Monroe, innocent, simple, unexacting at twenty-one, really
believed Rose to be the sweetly frank and artless person she seemed,
but Martie, two years younger, had her times of absolutely detesting
Rose. Sally was never jealous, but Martie burned with a fierce young

jealousy of all life: of Rose, with her dainty frocks and her rich friends,
her curly hair and her violin; of Florence Frost's riding horse; of Ida
Parker's glib French; of her own brother, Leonard Monroe, with his
male independence; of the bare-armed women who leaped on the big,
flat-backed horses in the circus; of the very Portuguese children who
rode home asleep of a summer afternoon, in fragrant loads of alfalfa.
To-day she was vaguely smarting at Grace's news: Grace was going to
work. She, like the Monroe girls, had often discussed the possibilities
of this step, but opportunities were not many, and the idle, pleasant
years drifted by with no change. But Ellie Hawkes, Grace's big sister,
who had kept books in the box factory for three years, was to be
married now; a step down for Ellie--for her "friend" was only Terry
Castle, a brawny, ignorant giant employed by the Express
Company--but a step up for Grace. She would be a wage- earner; her
pretty, weak face grew animated at the thought, and her shrill voice
more shrill.
Martie Monroe had no real desire to work in the box factory, to walk
daily the ugly half mile that lay between it and her home, to join the
ranks of toilers that filed through the poorer region of town every
morning. But like all growing young things she felt a desperate,
undefined need. She could not know that self-expression is as necessary
to natures like hers as breath is to young bodies. She could only grope
and yearn and struggle in the darkness of her soul.
She was nineteen, a tall, strong girl, already fully developed, and
handsome in a rather dull and heavy way. Her hands and feet were
beautifully made, her hair, although neglected, of a wonderful silky
bronze, and her skin naturally of the clear creamy type that sometimes
accompanies such hair. But Martie ruined her skin by injudicious
eating; she could not resist sweets; natural indolence, combined with
the idle life she led, helped to make her too fat. Now and then, in the
express office, in the afternoon, the girls got on the big freight scales,
and this was always a mortification to Martie. Terry Castle and Joe
Hawkes would laugh as they adjusted the weights, and Martie always
tried to laugh, too, but she did not think it funny. Martie might have

seemed to her world merely a sweet, big, good-natured tomboy,
growing into an eager, amusing, ignorant young woman, too fond