"There will have to be friends for
both of us. I need them, too. Oh, how I need one woman friend! And
where shall I find her? Somewhere in this city there must be just the
people I want--if only I could reach them!"

And presently she was saying aloud in a lazy careless tone of voice:

"Sometimes I get wondering, Joe, if there isn't a Paris in New York."

CHAPTER XI

It was a few weeks later. A doctor had been there and gone, and
returning into the living-room Ethel sank down on a chair with a quiet
intensity in her eyes. For some time she had not been feeling herself,
but she did not want to worry Joe, and so at last she had telephoned to
the clergyman who had married her.

"You may not remember me," she had said, "but you married me in
December. Perhaps you'll recall it if I say there were only three
friends at the church."

"Oh, yes, I remember it--perfectly."

"Thank you. I'm not quite well and I have no friends to turn to, so I'm
wondering if you could recommend a good doctor I could see."

The doctor recommended had just paid his visit. And now as the dusk
deepened she had the strangest feelings. Her year and a half in the
city seemed hurried and feverish as a dream. Her mind ran back into the
past and on into the future. Only a few days before, the round robin
letter had come again. In it the girl who had married the mining
engineer out West had told of having a baby in a little town in Montana.
Ethel had thought of the doctor then.

She rose now and got the letter and re-read it slowly. Presently she
put it down and began crying softly, though she felt neither sad nor
frightened. Her life had so completely changed. All those girl
friends, so scattered; all those years, so far behind. It was like
getting on a ship, she thought, to start across the ocean. "You can't
get off, you must go across. Oh, Ethel Lanier, how happy you'll be."
But the happiness seemed a long way off.

How quiet it was. The nurse came in with Susette from the park. Ethel
went into the nursery and kneeling down she began to unbutton Susette's
little jacket. The child's plump face was so rosy and cold. She kissed
it suddenly.

"Martha," she said, "I'll need you here for a long time now. I'm going
to have a baby."

She reddened then and held her breath. Queer, how she had blurted it
out! She had not meant to tell any one yet. But the look of dawning
joy and relief in Martha's eyes made her glad she had spoken. Plainly
the nu