Some days in the studio she stuck severely to her voice and showed him she meant business.  She was practising quite hard, and her progress was by no means slow.  But on other days half the hour at least was spent in learning from her new friend about “a Paris in New York.”  Dwight was already finding one, although he had been here less than a year.  In this teeming city of endless change he had found a deep joy of creation, of newness, youth and boldness that made even Paris seem far behind.  “It’s all so amazingly big,” he said, “with such revealing chances opening up on every side!” How simple it was for him, she thought, with a little pang of envy.  A young musician with plenty of talent, easy manners, single, free.  As he spoke of his club friends and some of their homes that were open to him, the glimpses exasperated her.  Here were the people she wanted to know, a little world of artists, architects and writers, and goodness only knew what else.  She was still rather vague about them.  To her surprise she discovered that many were after money, too.  “Decidedly,” her teacher said.  “Excessively,” he added.

“But at least,” she rejoined, defending them, “when they get the money they know how to spend it on something better than food and clothes!  They really live—­I’m sure they do—­and have ideas and really grow!” She caught her breath.  What an idiot, to have said so much!  “I’m so glad,” she added lamely, “that you got my husband into your club.  It’s bound to do so much for him.”  She threw a sharp little glance at Dwight, and scowled, for she thought she detected a smile.

“He’s doing something for the club,” Dwight was saying cheerfully.  “Some of those chaps are a bit too refined and remote for this raw crude city of ours.  And Joe is getting back enough of his old vim and passion, his wild radical ideas of what may still be done with the town, so that he jars on such sensitive souls—­makes ’em frown and bite their moustaches like the husbands in French plays.  On the other hand some are decidedly for him.  I hear them discuss him now and then.”

“Oh, how nice!” sighed Ethel.

At times she grew so impatient to get Joe into this other world.  But she had to be very careful.  Repeatedly she warned herself that Dwight, for all his Paris past and his present friendliness, was very fast becoming a New Yorker like the rest:  making his way and climbing his climb, and wanting no climbers who had to be carried.  “Ethel Lanier, the first thing you know you’ll be dropped like a hot potato,” she thought.  “There’s nothing unselfish about this man.  Don’t make him feel he has you on his hands.”  And she would grow studiously abstract and detached in her talk about the town.  But it kept cropping up in spite of her, this warm eagerness to “really live.”

“It’s funny,” she said to Dwight one day.  “I had thought of music and all that I wanted as being so different from Joe’s work.  But now in this city that you seem to know, I find that what I’ve wanted most is just what he ought to want in his work!  The two go together!”