How smoothly things were working out.  If there were any cloud upon the horizon it was the occasional presence of Amy’s old friend, Fanny Carr.  Fanny had been abroad through the summer, but in October she had returned.  She had come to see Ethel several times, in the same determinedly friendly way; and Nourse reported that she was going frequently to see Joe at his office about her eternal money affairs.  And the fact that Joe never spoke of it only made the matter worse.  For Joe still had his money side, and Fanny knew how to flatter him so.  He still had his loyalty to his first wife, and Fanny so cleverly played to that.  “And he likes her, too—­clothes, voice, perfumery and all!” Ethel would declare to herself in anger and vexation.  Oh, these women who used sex every minute! how could men be so easily fooled?

“You can’t change a man in a minute,” she thought.  “Remember Amy had him five years.”  Amy had planted so deep in him the feeling that money is everything; she had got the fever into his blood.  And Fanny was there to keep it alive by her flattery of his money success.  And for Ethel, even still, it was decidedly unsafe to criticize Joe in some of his moods.  As autumn changed to winter, these moods grew much more frequent.  What was worrying him?  She couldn’t find out.  She sent for Nourse and asked him, “What’s going on in the office?”

“The press agent is pushing him hard,” was Nourse’s gloomy answer, “for that row of patriotic atrocities up on Riverside Drive.”  Ethel squirmed.

“But he won’t!” she cried.  “He couldn’t!”

“Oh, yes he could,” Joe’s partner growled.  “There’s so much money in it!”

“If he puts that through I’m done for!” Ethel told herself that night.  “His name will be a perfect joke—­among all the people I want to know!  And they’ll all keep away from us as though he were running a yellow journal!  And then her friends will crowd about—­because we’ll be so rich, you see!  Oh, damn money!  Damn!  Damn!”

She was lying sleepless on her bed, and Joe was sleeping by her side.  She sat up now and looked at his face in the dim light from the window.

“If you get very rich,” she thought, “and middle-aged and very fat in body and soul, get to care only for building ‘junk’ and for going about with Amy’s friends—­I wonder what would I do then.”  Again the words of young Mrs. Grewe came up in her mind:  “You can get out whenever you choose.”  She frowned.  “But there are the children.  And besides, I love you, Joe—­yes, more than ever, and in a queer way!  I’m fighting for what I love in you, but at the same time I love you all—­every bit of you!” Breathing quickly now, she sank back on her pillow, and there she soon grew quiet again.  “So we’ll fight it out once and for all.  You’ve got to drop this plan of yours.”  One evening that same week when Nourse had come to dinner, she led the talk by slow degrees to that other plan of Joe’s—­the one with terrace gardens.  Soon she had Nourse talking about it, and seeing her husband grow morose she grew cheerily interested.