“What do you think I really want?” she asked him, then.  Her voice was low.

“Money,” he said.

“Where did you get that idea?”

“From your sister,” he replied.  “She sent for me, too—­long ago.”

“What for?”

“Money.  She told me that we were not making enough—­that I was holding her husband back—­from ‘his career’ she called it.  She said that if I kept him out of a certain job that meant money quick, she would break up our partnership.  She said she could do it, and she was right.  My hold on Joe wasn’t in it with hers.”

“What was your hold on him?  What do you mean?” asked Ethel.  Again her voice was low.  Nourse looked down at his big hands and answered very quietly: 

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand.”  She bit her lip.

“But until I do learn what you want of Joe,” she retorted sharply, “I’m afraid that I can’t tell you how much money I shall need.”  He glanced up at her, puzzled.  “Suppose you try me,” she went on.  And as the man still frowned at her, “I learned the other day,” she said, “that you knew Joe long before he was married.  I want you to tell me about that.”

Little by little she drew him out.  And as in a reluctant way, in sentences abrupt and bald, he answered all her questions, again and again did Ethel feel a little wave of excitement.  For Nourse was speaking of Joe’s youth—­of college and later of Paris, and then of a group of young men in New York, would—­be architects, painters and writers who had lived near Washington Square; of long talks, discussions, plans, and of all night work in the architect’s office where he and Joe had worked side by side.  Joe had been a “designer” there; he had been the brilliant one of the two, and the more impassioned and intense and bold in his conceptions.  There was a feeling almost of reverence in the low, rough voice of Joe’s friend.  He told how Joe had risen, until in a few years he became the chief designer for his firm; and of how from other firms offers had come.  To keep him his employers had been forced to raise his salary, and to do much more than that, for money didn’t appeal to him then.  They had given him more important work—­“job after job, and Joe made good.”  The climax of this rising had come one night in the rooms they shared, when Joe told his friend he had made up his mind to set up an office of his own, though he was only twenty-nine.

“And he offered me a partnership.”  The big man’s voice was husky now, as, in a little outburst with a good deal of bitterness in it, he spoke of the glory of the work of which he and Joe had once been a part.  He seemed appealing to Joe’s wife to see, for God’s sake, what it was in Joe that had been lost.  Then he stopped and frowned and stared at her.  “Oh, what’s the use?” he muttered.  But Ethel’s voice was sharp and clear: