?" cried
Eleanore in despair.

"Where I should have been long ago," he replied, without the shadow of a
ray of hope. He got up, and turning his face away from Eleanore, said in
a half-audible voice: "Let's have no argument, no cogency, no urgency.
Not now! Not now when I am creeping along on the earth with such light
as is left me, trying to grope my way out of the hole. A man doesn't
give up the ghost so quickly as all that, Eleanore. The stomach is a
very elastic piece of skin."

He went into the other room, sat down at the piano, and struck a
slow-moving bass chord.

Eleanore turned to the wall, and buried her feverish brow in her hands.

VII

It was not in Eleanore's nature to submit to a misfortune without first
having made every possible effort to evade it.

She wrote for from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that
she had finished all that was asked of her long before her time was
really up.

Then she looked around for a better paying position; it was in vain.
Women had never been paid well, she had no recommendations, no personal
connections, nothing on which she could depend or to which she might
refer.

Finally it occurred to her that she might make some money out of her
flowers. She went to the florist at St. Lorenz Place, taking with her a
garland of carnations and mignonettes she had made the day before. She
told the florist she knew a great deal about flowers and had had
considerable experience in handling them.

The man laughed at her, and told her he could find no sale for that kind
of things, and that, even if he could, he would have to ask so little
for them that it would not pay her to make them. Eleanore took her
flowers back home; she was profoundly discouraged. She saw herself how
perishable flowers were; these withered that same evening. Nothing could
be expected from that source.

She had not noticed that, as she left the florist shop, a man on the
other side of the street had stopped and looked at her. He was a haggard
young individual with a pale, peevish expression on his face, a man with
a chin the unimpressiveness of which was hidden behind a Vandyke beard.

He stood for a long while and looked at Eleanore as she walked down the
street. There could be no doubt but that something in her general
bearing and her face had drawn his attention to her; had awakened in him
a feeling that was nobler than mere curiosity or the satisfacti