d break us apart once and for all. She wouldn't have
Crothers in the firm--not only because it meant money lost, but because
Crothers' wife had turned her down." Ethel looked at him sharply.

"Oh--he has a wife," she said.

"Yes, and she wasn't your sister's kind. She was a college woman who
wanted to be a great painter--and when the painting petered out, she
shut her jaw and said, 'Never mind. If I can't paint landscapes I can
make them.' And she took up landscape gardening. She married Burt
Crothers soon after that, but she stuck to her work and in course of
time it fitted in with her husband's. He and Sally have struggled along
up-hill, and though they've never made much money they've had a lot of
fun out of life."

"She sounds so nice," Ethel hungrily murmured.

"Oh, yes, she's nice enough," he said, "until you go against her. Then
Sally gets mad, and stays that way. And she got that way," he added,
"when we turned her husband down. She hadn't liked your sister. In
fact, when Joe married and brought his wife and the Crothers together,
it wasn't a go. She called your sister 'hopeless.' And when Joe's wife
came back at her by keeping Crothers out of our firm, then war was
declared."

Nourse broke off and looked at Ethel.

"So you see what you're up against," he said. "Yes, I see," said Ethel.
At every door to her husband's youth, Amy seemed to be barring the way.
She gave an impatient little shrug. "If I could only show them!"

"What?"

"That I'm different! And the hole I'm in! And what it is I want in
Joe! . . . Can't you go and talk to them?" There was impatience again in
her eyes. He saw it and smiled wearily.

"You think I'm mighty weak," he said, "with not much fight left in me.
You're right, I guess. But you don't know what I've been through in the
last seven years. I stuck to Joe--and they didn't like that. Sally
said I had knuckled down to Joe's wife. So she hasn't asked me there in
years. And if I were to go to her now, I'm afraid my opinion of you
wouldn't count."

There was another silence. Again that dull weight of discouragement
fell, and again she shook it from her.

"Nevertheless," she said quietly, looking him full in the face, "I mean
to have Crothers in our firm." She saw the mingled liking and
compassion which came in his eyes, and she bit her lip to keep down the
wave of self-pity which arose in her.

"Perhaps you will," she heard him say. His voice sounded a long way
off. She broug