“Exactly!”

“The city Joe once lived in.”  She frowned.  “There are so many cities in New York.  But I don’t want to try to get into his, until I can do it through Joe himself.  People will have to want me because I’m the wife of Joe Lanier.”

“I think they’ll want you more than that.”  His tone was most reassuring.  “But I like the way you are going about it.  It’s so delightfully novel, you see—­conspiring to make your husband find his friends all by himself—­so that when he has found them he’ll come to you with a beaming smile and say, ’Woman, I bring you wealth and fame and friends in abundance.  Take them, love, and bless me—­for I have done all this for you.’”

Ethel smiled.  “I don’t like you to joke about it,” she said.

“Very well,” he agreed, “let’s get back to the serious work of his resurrection.  You asked me to recruit other brisk diggers, and I’ve hunted about quite a bit.  There’s that chap Crothers and his wife, but so far they’re the best I can do—­and the Crothers pair seem rather blind.  They can’t see the old Joe for the new.”

“You mean they think he’s hopeless,” Ethel scornfully put in.

“Oh, we’ll make them open their eyes in time.  I drop in on them every now and then.  I had Crothers to the club last week, and let him hear some of the gossip about the emerging Joe Lanier.”

Often he talked of the early group of students over in Paris, of their ideas, ambitions, and their youthful views of life, which for all their gaiety had been so fervid and intense.  But to Ethel, because she herself was still young, their dreams seemed very wonderful.  Some she had hungrily read about long ago with the history “prof” at home.  But the world which the little suffragist had revealed to her pupils had been more heroic and severe.  This was warmer, dazzling, this had beauty, this was art!  And yet not weak nor tame nor old—­this was gloriously new in the way it jabbed deep into life and talked of really changing it all.  This was youth!  And her own youth responded and she made it all her own.  She was reading now voraciously, with a sparkle and gleam of hope in her eyes.  She was coming so very close to her goal, or rather the gate of her promised land.

At times she grew impatient at her teacher’s calm, and the good-natured easy smile with which he looked upon all this.  “Oh, why not get excited!” she thought.  She felt the old dreams a bit cold in him, as they had been in her husband.  And in dismay she would ask herself: 

“Are they all too old?  Is just the fact that I’m ten years younger than Joe and his friends going to mean that I’m too late—­to bring back what was in him!”

CHAPTER XIX