not purchase she hunted up in libraries.  Nourse was a great help to her here.  He came to see her now and then; and though he still had his discouraging moods, at other times he was friendly and kind.  Enjoying this conspiracy with the charming young Mrs. Lanier, he expressed his gallantry by bringing her books of appalling size.  But some had beautiful illustrations that set her to imagining.  Eagerly she groped her way deep into the history of the building of cathedrals and palaces in times gone by.  And the long majestic story of man’s building on the earth thrilled her to the very soul.  Joe must make his place in it all!

When on coming home at night he dumped a pile of work on the table, she would unobtrusively slip some book beside it.  She grew to know which ones tempted him most.  He had been surprised and amused at first at her interest in architecture—­and secretly a little disturbed, suspecting what lay behind it.  But as autumn drew on he read more and more of the books she kept putting in his way.  While he read she would sit with a novel or sew.  She would glance up with some remark, and they would talk and then read on.  Subtly she made the atmosphere.  She often brought Paris into their talks.  She spoke longingly of the shops and plays, and all she wanted to see over there.  And she almost succeeded in making him promise to take her over the following spring.

Joe was happy at such times, when she could make him leave business alone.  And although he had many relapses, when night after night he would sit by the table planning more horrible “junk for the Bronx,” with an inner smile she saw how often her husband scowled at such labour now.  She heard of changes in the office.

“We ’re still building junk,” Nourse confided one day, “but it isn’t quite as bad as before.  Joe wants the money just as hard, but he’s plainly jarred by some of the jobs.  He even fought his press agent last week!”

One night Joe suggested awkwardly: 

“Suppose we try Bill Nourse again.  Let me bring him home to dinner, I mean.  He isn’t especially cheery, God knows—­but he seems so damnably lonely this fall.”

“Very well, dear—­if you want to,” she sighed.  She had told Nourse to hint he was lonely.

When Nourse came to dinner that Saturday night, Joe was surprised and delighted at the way his partner seemed to get on now with his wife.  The visit indeed was such a success that it was not long before Joe proposed bringing home “an old pal of mine—­fellow named Dwight.”  To this, too, Ethel assented, and when Dwight arrived one night she greeted him very graciously.

“I feel as though I knew you,” she said.  “I’ve heard Joe talk of you so much.”

To Joe’s delight they got on like old friends.  And when Dwight spied the piano there and learned of her interest in music, he insisted on trying her voice, and was loud in his praise of its promise.  Before he left, it was arranged that she should come to his studio and take lessons twice a week.  Openly his pupil now, she could speak of him to Joe, and he came to dine with them often.