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 latter
group she had "more fun," but that with her more elevated friends
she enjoyed, of course, "nicer times." Politically she steered a
diplomatic middle course between the two, implying, with equal
readiness, that she only associated with the poor Monroes because
Uncle Ben made her, or that she accepted invitations from the Frost
and Parker faction simply to be amiable.

Sally Monroe, innocent, simple, unexacting at twenty-one, really
believed Rose to be the sweetly frank and artless person she seemed,
but Martie, two years younger, had her times of absolutely detesting
Rose. Sally was never jealous, but Martie burned with a fierce young
jealousy of all life: of Rose, with her dainty frocks and her rich
friends, her curly hair and her violin; of Florence Frost's riding
horse; of Ida Parker's glib French; of her own brother, Leonard
Monroe, with his male independence; of the bare-armed women who
leaped on the big, flat-backed horses in the circus; of the very
Portuguese children who rode home asleep of a summer afternoon, in
fragrant loads of alfalfa.

To-day she was vaguely smarting at Grace's news: Grace was going to
work. She, like the Monroe girls, had often discussed the