t. She sent for
Nourse and asked him, "What's going on in the office?"

"The press agent is pushing him hard," was Nourse's gloomy answer, "for
that row of patriotic atrocities up on Riverside Drive." Ethel squirmed.

"But he won't!" she cried. "He couldn't!"

"Oh, yes he could," Joe's partner growled. "There's so much money in
it!"

"If he puts that through I'm done for!" Ethel told herself that night.
"His name will be a perfect joke--among all the people I want to know!
And they'll all keep away from us as though he were running a yellow
journal! And then her friends will crowd about--because we'll be so
rich, you see! Oh, damn money! Damn! Damn!"

She was lying sleepless on her bed, and Joe was sleeping by her side.
She sat up now and looked at his face in the dim light from the window.

"If you get very rich," she thought, "and middle-aged and very fat in
body and soul, get to care only for building 'junk' and for going about
with Amy's friends--I wonder what would I do then." Again the words of
young Mrs. Grewe came up in her mind: "You can get out whenever you
choose." She frowned. "But there are the children. And besides, I love
you, Joe--yes, more than ever, and in a queer way! I'm fighting for
what I love in you, but at the same time I love you all--every bit of
you!" Breathing quickly now, she sank back on her pillow, and there she
soon grew quiet again. "So we'll fight it out once and for all. You've
got to drop this plan of yours." One evening that same week when Nourse
had come to dinner, she led the talk by slow degrees to that other plan
of Joe's--the one with terrace gardens. Soon she had Nourse talking
about it, and seeing her husband grow morose she grew cheerily
interested.

"Oh, I'm very dull, I suppose," she said at the end with a quizzical
smile, "but I'm afraid I can't get it clear. Couldn't you draw it?"
Nourse smiled at this, for he saw what she was driving at.

"No, I'm poor at that," he said.

"Then, Joe, you sketch it out for me."

Joe put down his paper and began in surly fashion. But as he sketched
more and more rapidly, she saw the thing take hold of him. With little
exclamations and questions Ethel drove him on. She thought it a
fascinating plan but the details puzzled her still, she said, and the
rough sketch he had drawn was very unsatisfactory. She begged him to
draw it on a large scale, and he set out to do so. But his hand was
inexpert. Although once the most brilliant d