gela had never really forgiven him his indiscretions of the past, his
radical brutality in the last instance, but she was not holding them up
insistently against him. There were occasional scenes even yet, the
echoes of a far-off storm; but as long as they were making money and
friends were beginning to come back she did not propose to quarrel.
Eugene was very considerate. He was very, very hard-working. Why should
she nag him? He would sit by a window overlooking the park at night and
toil over his sketches and ideas until midnight. He was up and dressed
by seven, down to his office by eight-thirty, out to lunch at one or
later, and only back home at eight or nine o'clock at night. Sometimes
Angela would be cross with him for this, sometimes rail at
Mr. Summerfield for an inhuman brute, but seeing that the apartment was
so lovely and that Eugene was getting along so well, how could she
quarrel? It was for her benefit as much as for his that he appeared to
be working. He did not think about spending money. He did not seem to
care. He would work, work, work, until she actually felt sorry for him.

"Certainly Mr. Summerfield ought to like you," she said to him one day,
half in compliment, half in a rage at a man who would exact so much from
him. "You're valuable enough to him. I never saw a man who could work
like you can. Don't you ever want to stop?"

"Don't bother about me, Angelface," he said. "I have to do it. I don't
mind. It's better than walking the streets and wondering how I'm going
to get along"--and he fell to his ideas again.

Angela shook her head. Poor Eugene! If ever a man deserved success for
working, he certainly did. And he was really getting nice again--getting
conventional. Perhaps it was because he was getting a little older. It
might turn out that he would become a splendid man, after all.

CHAPTER XXXVI

There came a time, however, when all this excitement and wrath and
quarreling began to unnerve Eugene and to make him feel that he could
not indefinitely stand the strain. After all, his was the artistic
temperament, not that of a commercial or financial genius. He was too
nervous and restless. For one thing he was first astonished, then
amused, then embittered by the continual travesty on justice, truth,
beauty, sympathy, which he saw enacted before his eyes. Life stripped of
its illusion and its seeming becomes a rather deadly thing to
contemplate. Because of the ruthless, insistent,