He was quite easy about Lily.  He hadn’t seen her for more than a year, and she made no demands on him.  She was living in the two-family house on Ash Street, with the dressmaker and her three children and feeble-minded father, in the lower flat.  There was the desired back yard for Jacky, where a thicket of golden glow lounged against the fence, and where, tinder stretching clothes lines, a tiny garden overflowed with color and perfume.  Every day little Lily would leave her own work (which was heavy, for she had several “mealers”) and run downstairs to help Mrs. Hayes wash and dress the imbecile old man.  And she kept a pot of hyacinths blooming on his window sill.

Maurice (with grinding economies) sent her a quarterly money order, and felt that he was, as he expressed it to himself, “square with the game,”—­with the Lily-and-Jacky game.  He could never be square with the game he played with Eleanor; and as for his own “game,” his steadily pursued secretiveness was a denial of his own standards which permanently crippled his self-respect.  Though, curiously enough, these years of careful lying had made him, on every subject except those connected with the household in Medfield, of a most scrupulous truthfulness.  Indeed, the office still called him “G.  Washington.”

Jacky was six that winter—­a handsome, spoiled little boy.  He looked like Maurice—­the same friendly, eager, very bright blue eyes and the same shock of blond hair.  Lily’s ideas of discipline were, of course, ruining him, to which fact Maurice was entirely indifferent; his feeling about Jacky was nothing but a sort of spiritual nausea; Jacky was not only an economic nuisance, but he had made him a liar!  He said to himself that of course he didn’t want anything to happen to the brat ("that would break Lily’s heart!"), but—­

Then in March, something did happen to him.  It was on a Sunday that the child came down with scarlet fever, and Lily, in her terror, did the one thing that she had never done, and that Maurice, in his certainty of her “whiteness,” felt sure she never would or could do:  she sent a telegram—­to his house!

It had been a cold, sunny day.  Just before luncheon Eleanor had been summoned to Mrs. O’Brien’s:  “Donny is kind of pining; do please come and sing to him, Miss Eleanor,” the worried grandmother wrote, and Eleanor hadn’t the heart to refuse.  “I suppose,” she thought, looking at Maurice and Edith, “they’ll be glad to get rid of me!” They were squabbling happily as to whether altruism was not merely a form of selfishness; Edith had flung, “Idiot!” at Maurice; and Maurice had retorted, “I never expect a woman to reason!” It was the kind of squabbling which is the hall mark of friendship and humor, and it would have been impossible between Eleanor and her husband....  She left them, burning with impatience to get down to Mrs. O’Brien’s and back again in the shortest possible time.  As soon as she was out of the house Maurice disposed of altruism by a brief laying down of the law: