“Oh, if you only knew,” she cried, “how much good this is doing!  I won’t stop to explain but—­please—­go on!” Her brown eyes threw him a fierce appeal.  And again she had him talking.  He told of a plan for apartment buildings Joe had conceived in those early days.  “I don’t say it was practicable, I give it just to show you what the man had in him,” he said.  “Big ideas that strike in deep, the kind that change whole cities.”  Instead of a street like a canyon with sheer walls on either side, the front of each building was to recede in narrow terraces, floor by floor, so letting floods of sunlight down into the street below and giving to each apartment a small terrace garden.  As she listened, Ethel grew intent.  It was not the mere plan that excited her, she was giving small heed to the details.  But this had in it what she had craved ever since she had come to the city—­beauty and creative work—­and this had been in Joe’s “business”!

“There was only one point against it,” she heard Nourse saying presently.  “Those terraces took a lot of space.  Each one meant so much rent was lost.  For years, till the plan took hold of the town, it was a money loser. . . .  And Joe met your sister then.”  The voice had changed, and its hostile tone brought Ethel back with a sharp turn.  The man, as though uneasy at the revelations he had made, was looking at her as at first, with suspicion and dislike.  “I won’t go into details of how she got her hold on Joe.  You know how that’s done, I suppose.  I’m speaking of the effect on his work.  He soon put off that plan of his—­and any others of the kind.  For now he had to have money.  And he has been putting it off ever since—­not dropping it, he’ll tell you, only putting it off till he’s rich.  But if he isn’t rich enough soon, it’ll be too late.  For that part of him is nearly dead.

“But to go back to your sister.  It was not only his money, it was his time she needed.  First it was a wedding trip, and after that late hours—­a short day in his office.  And he wasn’t half the man he had been.  He was thinking of the night before, and then of the night that was coming.  She came for him at five o’clock.”  He saw Ethel start, and he added, “Just as you did later on.

“And when he did wake up to work, it was different—­it was for money alone.  He began to throw over his ideals, and very soon there was only me to hold him back.  You see, he had had so many friends before he met your sister, men and even women, too, who had been a spur to him.  But when he brought his wife around, they wouldn’t have her, turned her down—­and that made her bitter against them all and she kept Joe from them.  All but me.  I stayed in the office, and now and then I got some of his friends and we would take him out to lunch.  But then even that stopped.  Joe hadn’t time.  He was too busy getting the cash.