ere days
when the wind set another way, and I knew I'd pull it off yet, and
I thought you might have held on...." He stopped, his head a little
lowered, his concentrated gaze on her flushed face. "Well, anyhow," he
broke out, "you were my wife once, and you were my wife first--and if
you want to come back you've got to come that way: not slink through the
back way when there's no one watching, but walk in by the front door,
with your head up, and your Main Street look."

Since the days when he had poured out to her his great fortune-building
projects she had never heard him make so long a speech; and her heart,
as she listened, beat with a new joy and terror. It seemed to her that
the great moment of her life had come at last--the moment all her minor
failures and successes had been building up with blind indefatigable
hands.

"Elmer--Elmer--" she sobbed out.

She expected to find herself in his arms, shut in and shielded from all
her troubles; but he stood his ground across the room, immovable.

"Is it yes?"

She faltered the word after him: "Yes--?"

"Are you going to marry me?"

She stared, bewildered. "Why, Elmer--marry you? You forget!"

"Forget what? That you don't want to give up what you've got?"

"How can I? Such things are not done out here. Why, I'm a Catholic; and
the Catholic Church--" She broke off, reading the end in his face. "But
later, perhaps ... things might change. Oh, Elmer, if only you'd stay
over here and let me see you sometimes!"

"Yes--the way your friends see each other. We're differently made out in
Apex. When I want that sort of thing I go down to North Fifth Street for
it."

She paled under the retort, but her heart beat high with it. What he
asked was impossible--and she gloried in his asking it. Feeling her
power, she tried to temporize. "At least if you stayed we could be
friends--I shouldn't feel so terribly alone."

He laughed impatiently. "Don't talk magazine stuff to me, Undine Spragg.
I guess we want each other the same way. Only our ideas are different.
You've got all muddled, living out here among a lot of loafers who call
it a career to run round after every petticoat. I've got my job out at
home, and I belong where my job is."

"Are you going to be tied to business all your life?" Her smile was
faintly depreciatory.

"I guess business is tied to ME: Wall Street acts as if it couldn't get
along without me." He gave his shoulders a shake and moved a few steps
n