no wrong.

"You'll see," I said, "what she'll do to him."

The situation was to me astounding. Here was Life holding out its hands
to Elise, glory of youth demanding glorious response, and she,
incredibly, holding back. In spite of my gray hair and stiff figure, I
am of the galloping kind, and my soul followed Jimmie Harding's in its
quest for freedom.

But there was one thing that Elise could not do. She could not make
Jimmie rewrite his play. "I'll come to it some day," he said, "but not
yet. In the meantime I'll see what I can do with books."

He did a great deal with books, so that he wrote several best-sellers.
This eased the financial situation and they might have had more time for
things. But Elise still kept him at it. She wanted to be the wife of a
great man.

Yet as the years went on, Duncan and I began to wonder if her hopes
would be realized. Jimmie wrote and wrote. He was successful in a
commercial sense, but fame did not come to him. There was gray in his
burnt-gold hair; his shoulders acquired a scholarly droop, and he wore
glasses on a black ribbon. It was when he put on glasses that I began to
feel a thousand years old. Yet always when he was away from me I thought
of him as the Jimmie whose youth had shone with blinding radiance.

His constancy to Duncan and to me began to take on a rather pathetic
quality. The others in the office drifted gradually out of his life.
Some of them died, some of them resigned, some of them worked on, plump
or wizened parodies of their former selves. I was stouter than ever, and
stiffer, and the top of Duncan's head was a shining cone. And the one
interesting thing in our otherwise dreary days was Jimmie.

"You're such darling old dears," was his pleasant way of putting it.

But Duncan dug up the truth for me. "We knew him before he wrote. He
gets back to that when he is with us."

I had grown to hate Elise. It was not a pleasant emotion, and I am not
sure that she really deserved it. But Duncan hated her, too. "You're
right," he said one day when we had lunched with Jimmie; "she's sucked
him dry." Jimmie had been unusually silent. He had laughed little. He
had tapped the table with his finger, and had kept his eyes on his
finger. He had been absent-minded. "She has sucked him dry," said
Duncan, with great heat.

But she hadn't. That was the surprising thing. Just as we were all
giving up hope of Jimmie's proving himself something more than a hack,
he did the