through which sometimes a tigress looks!--looked
now at Maurice in passionate motherhood.

Maurice, putting the money down on the table, said, "I wish I could do
more for you, Lily; but I'm dreadfully strapped."

"Say, now, you take it right back! I can get along; I got my two
upstairs rooms rented, and I've got a new mealer. And if Jacky only
keeps well, I can manage fine. But that girl that's been wheelin' him
has measles at her house--little slut!" Lily said (the yellow eyes
glared); "she didn't let on to me about it. Wanted her two dollars a
week! If Jacky's caught 'em, I--I'll see to her!"

"Oh, he's all right," Maurice said; he didn't like "it"--although, if it
hadn't been for "it" he would probably, long before this, have slipped
down into the mere comfort of Lily; "it" held him prisoner in
self-contempt; "it," or perhaps the larger It? the It which he had seen
first in his glorious, passionately selfish ecstasy on his wedding day;
then glimpsed in the awful orderliness of the universe,--the It that
held the stars in their courses! Perhaps the tiny, personal thing, Joy,
and the stupendous, impersonal thing, Law, and the mysterious, unseen
thing, Life, were all one? "Call it God," Maurice had said of ecstasy,
and again of order; he did not call Jacky's milky lips "God." The little
personality which he had made was not in the least God to him! On the
contrary, it was a nuisance and a terror, and a financial anxiety. He
shrank from the thought of it, and kept "decent," merely through disgust
at the child as an entity--an entity which had driven him into loathsome
evasions and secrecies which once in a while sharpened into little lies.
But he was faintly sorry, now, to see Lily look unhappy about the Thing;
and he even had a friendly impulse to comfort her: "Jacky's all right!
But I'll send a doctor in, if you want me to. I saw a doctor's shingle
out as I came around the corner."

She said she'd be awfully obliged; and he, looking at his watch, and
realizing that Mrs. Houghton's train was due in less than an hour,
hurried off.

The doctor's bell was not answered promptly; then the doctor detained
him by writing down the address, getting it wrong, correcting it, and
saying: "Mrs. Dale? Oh yes; you are Mr. Dale?"

"No--not at all! Just a friend. I happened to be calling, and Mrs. Dale
asked me to stop and ask you to come in."

Then he rushed off. On the way to town, staring out of the window of the
car, he ting