musician with plenty of talent, easy
manners, single, free. As he spoke of his club friends and some of
their homes that were open to him, the glimpses exasperated her. Here
were the people she wanted to know, a little world of artists,
architects and writers, and goodness only knew what else. She was still
rather vague about them. To her surprise she discovered that many were
after money, too. "Decidedly," her teacher said. "Excessively," he
added.

"But at least," she rejoined, defending them, "when they get the money
they know how to spend it on something better than food and clothes!
They really live--I'm sure they do--and have ideas and really grow!" She
caught her breath. What an idiot, to have said so much! "I'm so glad,"
she added lamely, "that you got my husband into your club. It's bound
to do so much for him." She threw a sharp little glance at Dwight, and
scowled, for she thought she detected a smile.

"He's doing something for the club," Dwight was saying cheerfully.
"Some of those chaps are a bit too refined and remote for this raw crude
city of ours. And Joe is getting back enough of his old vim and
passion, his wild radical ideas of what may still be done with the town,
so that he jars on such sensitive souls--makes 'em frown and bite their
moustaches like the husbands in French plays. On the other hand some
are decidedly for him. I hear them discuss him now and then."

"Oh, how nice!" sighed Ethel.

At times she grew so impatient to get Joe into this other world. But
she had to be very careful. Repeatedly she warned herself that Dwight,
for all his Paris past and his present friendliness, was very fast
becoming a New Yorker like the rest: making his way and climbing his
climb, and wanting no climbers who had to be carried. "Ethel Lanier,
the first thing you know you'll be dropped like a hot potato," she
thought. "There's nothing unselfish about this man. Don't make him
feel he has you on his hands." And she would grow studiously abstract
and detached in her talk about the town. But it kept cropping up in
spite of her, this warm eagerness to "really live."

"It's funny," she said to Dwight one day. "I had thought of music and
all that I wanted as being so different from Joe's work. But now in
this city that you seem to know, I find that what I've wanted most is
just what he ought to want in his work! The two go together!"

"Exactly!"

"The city Joe once lived in." She frowned. "There are so many