onroe, had married, and had built themselves homes. They
had invested and re-invested their money; they had given their children
advantages, according to their lights. Now, in their early fifties,
they were a power in the town, and they felt for it a genuine affection
and pride, a loyalty that was unquestioning and sincere. In the kindly
Western fashion these two were now accorded titles; Cyrus, who had
served in the Civil War, was "Colonel Frost," and to Graham, who had
been a lawyer, was given the titular dignity of being "Judge Parker."

Malcolm Monroe kept pace with neither his old associates nor with the
times. His investments were timid and conservative, his faith in the
town that had been named for his father frequently wavered. He was in
everything a reactionary, refusing to see that neither the sheep of the
old Spanish settlers nor the gold of the early pioneers meant so 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 lat