fought his press agent last
week!"

One night Joe suggested awkwardly:

"Suppose we try Bill Nourse again. Let me bring him home to dinner, I
mean. He isn't especially cheery, God knows--but he seems so damnably
lonely this fall."

"Very well, dear--if you want to," she sighed. She had told Nourse to
hint he was lonely.

When Nourse came to dinner that Saturday night, Joe was surprised and
delighted at the way his partner seemed to get on now with his wife.
The visit indeed was such a success that it was not long before Joe
proposed bringing home "an old pal of mine--fellow named Dwight." To
this, too, Ethel assented, and when Dwight arrived one night she greeted
him very graciously.

"I feel as though I knew you," she said. "I've heard Joe talk of you so
much."

To Joe's delight they got on like old friends. And when Dwight spied
the piano there and learned of her interest in music, he insisted on
trying her voice, and was loud in his praise of its promise. Before he
left, it was arranged that she should come to his studio and take
lessons twice a week. Openly his pupil now, she could speak of him to
Joe, and he came to dine with them often.

How smoothly things were working out. If there were any cloud upon the
horizon it was the occasional presence of Amy's old friend, Fanny Carr.
Fanny had been abroad through the summer, but in October she had
returned. She had come to see Ethel several times, in the same
determinedly friendly way; and Nourse reported that she was going
frequently to see Joe at his office about her eternal money affairs.
And the fact that Joe never spoke of it only made the matter worse. For
Joe still had his money side, and Fanny knew how to flatter him so. He
still had his loyalty to his first wife, and Fanny so cleverly played to
that. "And he likes her, too--clothes, voice, perfumery and all!" Ethel
would declare to herself in anger and vexation. Oh, these women who
used sex every minute! how could men be so easily fooled?

"You can't change a man in a minute," she thought. "Remember Amy had
him five years." Amy had planted so deep in him the feeling that money
is everything; she had got the fever into his blood. And Fanny was
there to keep it alive by her flattery of his money success. And for
Ethel, even still, it was decidedly unsafe to criticize Joe in some of
his moods. As autumn changed to winter, these moods grew much more
frequent. What was worrying him? She couldn't find ou