Martie The Unconquered | Page 4

minutes
in the dark and dirty room upon an absolutely unnecessary errand, and
now they sauntered forth into the village street keenly aware that the
afternoon was not yet waning, and disheartened by the slow passage of
time. At five they would go to Bonestell's drug store, and sit in a row at
the soda counter, and drink effervescent waters pleasingly mingled with
fruit syrups and an inferior quality of ice cream. Five o'clock was the
hour for "sodas," neither half-past four nor half-past five was at all the
same thing in the eyes of Monroe's young people. After that they would
wander idly toward the bridge, and separate; Grace Hawkes turning
toward the sunset for another quarter of a mile, Rose Ransome opening
the garden gate of the pretty, vine-covered cottage near the bridge, and
the Monroe girls, Sarah and Martha, in a desperate hurry now, flying up
the twilight quiet of North Main Street to the long picket fence, the
dark, tree-shaded garden, and the shabby side-doorway of the old
Monroe house.
Three of these girls met almost every afternoon, going first to each
other's houses, and later wandering down for the mail, for some trivial
errand at drug store or dry-goods store, and for the inevitable ices. Rose
Ransome was not often with them, for Rose was just a little superior in
several ways to her present companions, and frequently spent the
afternoon practising on her violin, or driving, or walking with the
Parker girls and Florence Frost, who hardly recognized the existence of
Grace Hawkes and the Monroes. The one bank in Monroe was the Frost
and Parker Bank; there were Frost Street and Parker Street, the Frost
Building and the Parker Building. May and Ida Parker and Florence
Frost had gone to Miss Bell's Private School when they were little, and
then to Miss Spencer's School in New York.
But even all this might not have accounted for the exclusive social
instincts of the young ladies if both families had not been very rich. As
it was, with prosperous fathers and ambitious mothers, with well-kept,
old-fashioned homes, pews in church, allowances of so many hundred
dollars a year, horses to ride and drive, and servants to wait upon them,
the three daughters of these two prominent families considered

themselves as obviously better than their neighbours, and bore
themselves accordingly. Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker had come to
California as young men, in the seventies; had cast in their lot with
little Monroe, and had grown rich with the town. It was a credit to the
state now; they had found it a mere handful of settlers' cabins, with one
stately, absurd mansion standing out among them, in a plantation of
young pepper and willow and locust and eucalyptus trees.
This was the home of Malcolm Monroe, turreted, mansarded,
generously filled with the glass windows that had come in a sailing
vessel around the Horn. Incongruous, pretentious, awkward, it might to
a discerning eye have suggested its owner, who was then not more than
thirty years old; a tall, silent, domineering man. He was reputed rich,
and Miss Elizabeth--or "Lily"--Price, a pretty Eastern girl who visited
the Frosts in the winter of 1878, was supposed to be doing very well for
herself when she married him, and took her bustles and chignons, her
blonde hair with its "French twist," and her scalloped, high-buttoned
kid shoes to the mansion on North Main Street.
Now the town had grown to several hundred times its old size; schools,
churches, post-office, shops, a box factory, a lumber yard, and a winery
had come to Monroe. There was the Town Hall, a plain wooden
building, and, at the shabby outskirts of South Main Street, a jail. The
Interurban Trolley "looped" the town once every hour.
All these had helped to make Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker rich.
They, like Malcolm Monroe, 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