live. I'm
going."

And she went.

Jo stayed on in the apartment until the lease was up. Then he sold
what furniture he could, stored or gave away the rest, and took a room
on Michigan Avenue in one of the old stone mansions whose decayed
splendor was being put to such purpose.

Jo Hertz was his own master. Free to marry. Free to come and go. And
he found he didn't even think of marrying. He didn't even want to come
or go, particularly. A rather frumpy old bachelor, with thinning hair
and a thickening neck.

Every Thursday evening he took dinner at Eva's, and on Sunday noon at
Stell's. He tucked his napkin under his chin and openly enjoyed the
homemade soup and the well-cooked meats. After dinner he tried to talk
business with Eva's husband, or Stell's. His business talks were the
old-fashioned kind, beginning:

"Well, now, looka here. Take, f'rinstance, your raw hides and
leathers."

But Ben and George didn't want to take, f'rinstance, your raw hides and
leathers. They wanted, when they took anything at all, to take golf,
or politics, or stocks. They were the modern type of businessman who
prefers to leave his work out of his play. Business, with them, was a
profession--a finely graded and balanced thing, differing from Jo's
clumsy, down-hill style as completely as does the method of a great
criminal detective differ from that of a village constable. They would
listen, restively, and say, "Uh-uh," at intervals, and at the first
chance they would sort of fade out of the room, with a meaning glance
at their wives. Eva had two children now. Girls. They treated Uncle
Jo with good-natured tolerance. Stell had no children. Uncle Jo
degenerated, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the position of
honored guest, who is served with white meat, to that of one who is
content with a leg and one of those obscure and bony sections which,
after much turning with a bewildered and investigating knife and fork,
leave one baffled and unsatisfied.

Eva and Stell got together and decided that Jo ought to marry.

"It isn't natural," Eva told him. "I never saw a man who took so
little interest in women."

"Me!" protested Jo, almost shyly. "Women!"

"Yes. Of course. You act like a frightened schoolboy."

So they had in for dinner certain friends and acquaintances of fitting
age. They spoke of them as "splendid girls." Between thirty-six and
forty. They talked awfully well, in a firm, clear way, about ci