al ride on
the elevated train. That evening the trunk came, and Martie, feeling
still in a whirl of new impressions, unpacked in the big bare bedroom;
as pleased as a child to arrange her belongings in the empty bureau or
hang them in the shallow closet. She had been looking forward, for five
hot days, to the pleasure of a bath and a quiet bed. The bath was not
to be had; neither faucet in the bathroom ran hot; but the bed was
deliciously comfortable, and Martie tumbled into it with only one
thought in her head:

"Anyway, whatever happens now--I'm here in New York!"

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.

Th