l."

"Thank you," responded Oliver, and tried from the bottom of his soul to
make the words sincere.

"If the time ever comes when you feel that you have changed your mind,
I'll find a place out at Matoaca City for you. I just wanted you to
understand that I'd do as much for Henry's son then as now. If you
weren't Henry's son, I shouldn't think twice about you."

"You mean that you'll still give me the job if I stop writing plays?"

"Oh, I won't make a point of that as long as it doesn't interfere with
your work. You may write in off hours as much as you want to. I won't
make a point of that."

"You mean to be generous, I can see--but I don't think it likely that I
shall ever make up my mind to take a regular job. I'm not built for it."

"You're not thinking about getting married, then, I reckon?"

A dark flush rose to Oliver's forehead, and turning away, he stared with
unseeing eyes out of the window.

"No. I haven't any intention of that," he responded.

A certain craftiness appeared in Cyrus's face.

"Well, well, you're young yet, and you may be in want of a wife before
you're many years older."

"I'm not the kind to marry. I'm too fond of my freedom."

"Most of us have felt like that at one time or another, but when the
thought of a woman takes you by the throat, you'll begin to see things
differently. And if you ever do, a good steady job at twelve hundred a
year will be what you'll look out for."

"I suppose a man could marry on that down here," said Oliver, half
unconscious that he was speaking aloud.

"I married on less, and I've known plenty of others that have done so. A
good saving wife puts more into a man's pocket than she takes out of
it."

As he paused, Oliver's attention, which had wandered off into a vague
mist of feeling, became suddenly riveted to the appalling spectacle of
his uncle's marriage. He saw the house in Bolingbroke Street, with the
worn drab oilcoth in the hall, and he smelt the smell of stale cooking
which floated through the green lattice door at the back. All the
sweetness of life, all the beauty, all the decency even, seemed
strangled in that smell as if in some malarial air. And in the midst of
it, the unkempt, slack figure of Belinda, with her bitter eyes and her
sagging skirt, passed perpetually under the flickering gas-jet up and
down the dimly lighted staircase. This was how one marriage had
ended--one marriage among many which had started out with passion and
c