If the council wouldn't accept it, very well. The women's club would build it to suit itself, would manage it, and endow it. And through four years of opposition and complications they had worked steadily on, straight to the dedication of the hall which now, full of the morning delphiniums, waited for its evening christening. And Emily was very tired.

For Mrs. Benton was clever enough to realize her own weaknesses, and in launching the dancing-center plan she had felt the need of some one to pour oil on the waters she troubled. And there was Emily Kenworthy, just at hand, who was, as Johnnie Benton said, a "natural born oil-can," an easy-going woman who got along with anyone, even that cranky old servant that bossed her around. So Mrs. Benton had pounced upon Emily. And Emily had submitted, with misgivings, welcoming any relief from the vacancy of life she had suffered since Jim's death. The strife of it all was nothing to Emily. She had never found stimulus in overcoming opposition. She had no respect for committees, no interest in rules of order. Blue prints made her yawn, and the very idea of signing her name to a contract oppressed her. From the first she had seen the project merely as a toy for Martha, a patch of sunlight in her daughter's background. It had been only her interest in Martha and all those children about her that had kept Emily working away these five years, while one woman after another had resigned in fury.

Emily had been so unhappy as a child that her mind enjoyed playing with the idea of a beautiful gathering-place all lighted and shining by a multitude of happy boys and girls. She had always liked the children who played about with Martha. And since that summer during the war, when Jim's son, that dear, befuddled, tragic Bronson, had carried the burden of his unnecessary sorrow all those weeks unsuspected beneath her very eyes, she had never passed a half-grown lad on the street without a second wondering look at him. How could a town be stupid, she often wondered, having in it a world esoteric, unexplored, unimagined for the most part by adults, very jungles of young terror hiding adolescent beds of precious ore. "How do you come to know all the children in town?" women asked Emily more than once. "They can't all come to see Martha." But if you're interested, you do get to know them some way. They run errands, they deliver groceries, they come about selling tickets to high-school plays, they spray the apple trees in the spring, they borrow books—they just some way hang about. At least that was Emily's explanation.

The whole community she had come to think of as a nursery for Martha and her kind. Her grandfather, to be sure, had laid out the main street of the town, and Bob had adorned one corner of it recently with a huge yawning garage, but the real importance to Emily of those streets was the fact that Martha and her friends strolled along them towards their sundaes. Her grandfather had planted the trees about the house. But Emily had come to esteem them because they had afforded high swings for little girls. Emily had first seen Jim Kenworthy under the willow that leaned out over the river where her back yard meets the water. Bob had proposed to her in that very spot. But now that tree was precious because Martha's boat was generally anchored there. And when Bob talked of sawing off that lower limb, to build a new garage, she had risen in arms because Martha had as a child spent hours in that broad seat it made. She had never been allowed herself to climb trees, but Martha had spent whole mornings there, and soon, in not many years, well—who could tell, maybe Martha's own boys and girls would be hiding their treasures in those lovely soft hollow places within reach of young hands. She couldn't just say to Bob that she was saving that very low limb for her grandchildren, could she? And she never exactly said to Mrs. Benton that she was working for the community hall because she didn't want Martha to dance only out there in the country club aloof from the life of the town. Emily had been taught to consider the Western town a place scarcely worthy of her Eastern breeding. She wasn't going to have any such nonsense as that with Martha. She'd send her East to school, but she was to feel herself altogether Western. And it was high time she did, too, since she was the fourth generation to live in the West.

However, whatever the motives, whatever the difficulties, the work had been accomplished. Day by day, all the spring putting in whole mornings over the finishing of it, they had labored away, and they would be infinitely relieved when it was over to-morrow. Emily was weary with it all. The car rolled along, smoothly, as usual, when Martha took it over the bad roads, and, musing sleepily, she thought of all the women had done, and wondered pleasantly why this old friend she was going to see had decided so suddenly to return to her home that Emily must come to see her a few minutes that very afternoon. She was almost asleep when she heard Martha's voice, a rather stern tone of it:

"Mother!"

"Well?"

"I don't often criticize you, do I now?"

"Not very often. I suppose you're a rather tolerant daughter, as daughters go. What have I done now?" Emily yawned.

"I was just thinking about things. Both dad and Uncle Jim lived in this town when you were a girl, didn't they?"