ing but a convention.

Nor did she take it so.

"Help Julian through this next year," she said. "People will take it
harder than he knows. He'll need you all." And she was kind enough
to add something about my tact. Poor lady! She must have mentally
withdrawn her little compliment before we met many times again.

II

Perhaps the only fault in Anne's education of her husband had been
her inability to cling. In his new menage this error was rectified,
and the effect on him was conspicuously good; in fact, I think Rose's
confidence in his greatness pulled them through the difficult time.

For there was no denying that it was difficult. Many people looked
coldly on them, and I know there was even some talk of asking him to
resign from the firm of architects of which he was a member. The
other men were all older, and very conservative. Julian represented
to them everything that was modern and dangerous. Granger, the
leading spirit, was in the habit of describing himself as holding
old-fashioned views, by which he meant that he had all the virtues
of the Pilgrim Fathers and none of their defects. I never liked him,
but I could not help respecting him. The worst you could say of him
was that his high standards were always successful.

You felt that so fanatical a sense of duty ought to have required
some sacrifices.

To such a man Julian's conduct appeared not only immoral but
inadvisable, and unfitting in a young man, especially without
consulting his senior partners.

We used to say among ourselves that Granger's reason for wanting to
get rid of Julian was not any real affection for the dim old moral
code, but rather his acute realization that without Anne his junior
partner was a less valuable asset.

Things were still hanging fire when I paid her the first of my
annual visits. She was dreadfully distressed at my account of the
situation. She had the manner one sometimes sees in dismissed nurses
who meet their former little charges unwashed or uncared for. She
could hardly believe it was no longer her business to put the whole
matter right.

"Can't she do something for him?" she said. "Make her bring him a
great building. That would save him."

It was this message that I carried home to Rose; at least I suggested
the idea to her as if it were my own. I had my doubts of her being
able to carry it out.

Out of loyalty to Julian, or perhaps I ought to say out of loyalty to
Anne, we had all accepted Ros