that is all right, for I suppose it has to be. You
couldn't love any woman long, I think. I know what you say about your
having to go to New York to broaden your field is true. You ought to,
but I'm sorry you didn't come out. You might have. Still I don't blame
you, Eugene. It isn't much different from what has been going on for
some time. I have cared but I'll get over that, I know, and I won't ever
think hard of you. Won't you return me the notes I have sent you from
time to time and my pictures? You won't want them now.

"Ruby."

There was a little blank space on the paper and then:--

"I stood by the window last night and looked out on the street. The
moon was shining and those dead trees were waving in the wind. I saw the
moon on that pool of water over in the field. It looked like silver. Oh,
Eugene, I wish I were dead."

He jumped up as he read these words and clenched the letter in his
hands. The pathos of it all cut him to the quick, raised his estimate of
her, made him feel as if he had made a mistake in leaving her. He really
cared for her after all. She was sweet. If she were here now he could
live with her. She might as well be a model in New York as in Chicago.
He was on the verge of writing this, when one of the long, almost daily
epistles Angela was sending arrived and changed his mood. He did not see
how, in the face of so great and clean a love as hers, he could go on
with Ruby. His affection had obviously been dying. Should he try to
revive it now?

This conflict of emotions was so characteristic of Eugene's nature, that
had he been soundly introspective, he would have seen that he was an
idealist by temperament, in love with the aesthetic, in love with love,
and that there was no permanent faith in him for anybody--except the
impossible she.

As it was, he wrote Ruby a letter breathing regret and sorrow but not
inviting her to come. He could not have supported her long if she had,
he thought. Besides he was anxious to secure Angela. So that affair
lapsed.

In the meantime he visited the magazine offices. On leaving Chicago he
had put in the bottom of his trunk a number of drawings which he had
done for the _Globe_--his sketches of the Chicago River, of Blue Island
Avenue, of which he had once made a study as a street, of Goose Island
and of the Lake front. There were some street scenes, too, all forceful
in the peculiar massing of their blacks, the unexpected, almost
flashing, use of a st