esigner in town, for years
Joe had stuck to the business side, and his hand had grown clumsy, his
memory cold. Ethel had known of this from Nourse. And now probing by
her questions as to details here and there, with Nourse helping at her
side, she revealed Joe's weakness to himself. A scared angry look came
into his eyes. Stubbornly he worked on and on, but the thing would not
come as it used to!

And this revealing process continued until Nourse with masculine pity
dropped out of the torturing and went home. But Ethel gently encouraged
Joe, and in his dogged persistency he kept at it half the night. The
more tired he grew, the worse was his work. And again and again, as she
glanced at his face, she saw that frightened look in his eyes. It
almost brought the tears in her own, but steadily she kept thinking:

"I'm scaring him badly, and that's what he needs. For years he has been
telling himself that first he would make money and then he would work
out his ideals. But he's frightened now. He's wondering if he has put
it off too long?"

Pitilessly she goaded him on. Then at last she relented and began to
persuade him to go to bed. How white and haggard and queer he looked.
Again a lump rose in her throat. Soon she was saying quietly:

"I should think that some day, dear, you'd want to go back to Paris and
work."

He made no answer.

But in the weeks that followed, she dropped this thought again and again
into his mind. Paris, study, work, old dreams--she played these against
his business, against Amy and her friends and the flattery of Fanny
Carr, against that odious press agent and the plan for Riverside Drive.

"Has he turned it down?" she inquired of his partner.

"Not yet," was the answer. "It's still in the air.

"I wish this were over," Ethel thought. Joe's face had grown so queer
and drawn that sometimes as she looked at him a sickening dread stole
into her mind. "Is he really too old?" she asked herself.

One Saturday night when he came home, with a sudden leap of compassion
she saw what a day he had been through. "But he is through! Something
has happened!" she thought. And she treated him very tenderly--both
because of the state he was in, and more perhaps because she knew how
bad it would be for both of them if he had decided against her.

"How has the work been going?" she asked. He looked at her almost with
dislike.

"For a month," he said, "you've been trying to make me give up that
Riverside