marriage should take place in San Francisco,
Wallace sensibly suggesting that there would be less embarrassing
questioning there, and also that Martie's money might be spent to
better advantage in the city.

Martie's trunk came to Sally's house the next morning, unaccompanied by
message or note, and three days later Martie wrote her mother a long
letter from a theatrical boarding-house in Geary Street, sending a copy
of the marriage certificate of Martha Salisbury Monroe to Edward
Vincent Tenney in Saint Patrick's Church, San Francisco, and observing
with a touch of pride that "my husband" was now rehearsing for an
engagement of seven weeks at sixty dollars a week. There was no answer.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

For days it was her one triumphant thought. She was married! She was
splendidly and unexpectedly a wife. And her life partner was no mere
Monroe youth, and her home was not merely one of the old, familiar
Monroe cottages. She was the wife of a rising actor, and she lived in
the biggest city of the State!

Martie exulted innocently and in secret. She reviewed the simple fact
again and again. The two Monroe girls were married. A dimple would
deepen in her cheek, a slow smile tug at her lips, when she thought of
it. She told Wallace, in her simple childish way, that she had never
really expected to be married; she thought that she would like to go
back to Monroe for a visit, and let her old friends see the plain gold
ring on her big, white hand.

Everything in Martie's life, up to this point, had helped her to
believe that marriage was the final step in any woman's experience. A
girl was admired, was desired, and was married, if she was, humanly
speaking, a success. If she was not admired, if no one asked her in
marriage, she was a failure. This was the only test.

Martie's thoughts never went on to the years that followed marriage,
the experiences and lessons; these were all lost in the golden glow
that surrounded the step safely accomplished. That the years between
thirty and fifty are as long as the years between ten and thirty, never
occurred to her. With the long, dull drag of her mother's life before
her eyes, she never had thought that Rose's life, that Sally's life, as
married women, could ever be long and dull. They were married--doubt
and surmise and hope were over. Lydia and Miss Fanny were not married.
Therefore, Rose and Sally and Martie had an obvious advantage over
Lydia and Fanny.

It