is, and then of a
group of young men in New York, would--be architects, painters and
writers who had lived near Washington Square; of long talks,
discussions, plans, and of all night work in the architect's office
where he and Joe had worked side by side. Joe had been a "designer"
there; he had been the brilliant one of the two, and the more
impassioned and intense and bold in his conceptions. There was a
feeling almost of reverence in the low, rough voice of Joe's friend. He
told how Joe had risen, until in a few years he became the chief
designer for his firm; and of how from other firms offers had come. To
keep him his employers had been forced to raise his salary, and to do
much more than that, for money didn't appeal to him then. They had
given him more important work--"job after job, and Joe made good." The
climax of this rising had come one night in the rooms they shared, when
Joe told his friend he had made up his mind to set up an office of his
own, though he was only twenty-nine.

"And he offered me a partnership." The big man's voice was husky now,
as, in a little outburst with a good deal of bitterness in it, he spoke
of the glory of the work of which he and Joe had once been a part. He
seemed appealing to Joe's wife to see, for God's sake, what it was in
Joe that had been lost. Then he stopped and frowned and stared at her.
"Oh, what's the use?" he muttered. But Ethel's voice was sharp and
clear:

"Oh, if you only knew," she cried, "how much good this is doing! I
won't stop to explain but--please--go on!" Her brown eyes threw him a
fierce appeal. And again she had him talking. He told of a plan for
apartment buildings Joe had conceived in those early days. "I don't say
it was practicable, I give it just to show you what the man had in him,"
he said. "Big ideas that strike in deep, the kind that change whole
cities." Instead of a street like a canyon with sheer walls on either
side, the front of each building was to recede in narrow terraces, floor
by floor, so letting floods of sunlight down into the street below and
giving to each apartment a small terrace garden. As she listened, Ethel
grew intent. It was not the mere plan that excited her, she was giving
small heed to the details. But this had in it what she had craved ever
since she had come to the city--beauty and creative work--and this had
been in Joe's "business"!

"There was only one point against it," she heard Nourse saying
presently. "Those