ous for me to go on with the Curley
boarding-house," Martie said one day, "and sometimes now I think I
should have done so."

"Good heavens!" Lydia, smoothing the thin old blankets on Martie's
wide, flat bed, stopped aghast. "But why should you--Pa is more than
willing to have you here!"

"I know, darling. But what really deterred me was not so much Pa's
generosity, but the fact that I would have had to lease the property
for three years; George Curley wanted to be rid of the responsibility.
And to really make the thing a success, I should have had the adjoining
house, too; that would have been about four thousand rent."

"Four thousand--Martie, you would have been crazy!"

Martie, tinkling pins into a saucer on the bureau, opening the upper
drawer to sweep her brush and comb into it, and jerking the limp linen
scarf straight, only smiled and shrugged in answer. She had been
widowed three months, and already reviving energy and self-confidence
were running in her veins. Already she realized that it had been a
mistake to accept her father's hospitality in the first panic of being
dependent. However graceful and dignified her position was to the
outsider's eye, in this old house in the sunken block, she knew now
that Pa was really unable to offer her anything more than a temporary
relief from financial worry, and that her chances of finding employment
in Monroe as compared to New York were about one to ten.

Malcolm Monroe had been deeply involved for several years in "the firm"
by which term he and Len referred to their real estate business
together. A large tract of grassy brown meadow, south of the town, had
been in his possession for thirty years; it was only with the opening
of the new "Monroe's Grove" that he had realized its possibilities, or
rather that Len had realized them.

Len had held one or two office positions in Monroe unsatisfactorily
before his twentieth year, and then had persuaded his father to send
him to Berkeley, to the State University. Ma and Lydia had been proud
of their under-graduate for one brief year, then Len was back again,
disgusted with study. After a few months of drifting and experimenting,
the brilliant idea of developing the old south tract into building
sites had occurred to Len, and presently his father was also persuaded
that here was a splendid opportunity. A little office on Main Street
was rented, and its window embellished with the words "Own a Home in
the Monroe Estates