“Oh, I’m very dull, I suppose,” she said at the end with a quizzical smile, “but I’m afraid I can’t get it clear.  Couldn’t you draw it?” Nourse smiled at this, for he saw what she was driving at.

“No, I’m poor at that,” he said.

“Then, Joe, you sketch it out for me.”

Joe put down his paper and began in surly fashion.  But as he sketched more and more rapidly, she saw the thing take hold of him.  With little exclamations and questions Ethel drove him on.  She thought it a fascinating plan but the details puzzled her still, she said, and the rough sketch he had drawn was very unsatisfactory.  She begged him to draw it on a large scale, and he set out to do so.  But his hand was inexpert.  Although once the most brilliant designer in town, for years Joe had stuck to the business side, and his hand had grown clumsy, his memory cold.  Ethel had known of this from Nourse.  And now probing by her questions as to details here and there, with Nourse helping at her side, she revealed Joe’s weakness to himself.  A scared angry look came into his eyes.  Stubbornly he worked on and on, but the thing would not come as it used to!

And this revealing process continued until Nourse with masculine pity dropped out of the torturing and went home.  But Ethel gently encouraged Joe, and in his dogged persistency he kept at it half the night.  The more tired he grew, the worse was his work.  And again and again, as she glanced at his face, she saw that frightened look in his eyes.  It almost brought the tears in her own, but steadily she kept thinking: 

“I’m scaring him badly, and that’s what he needs.  For years he has been telling himself that first he would make money and then he would work out his ideals.  But he’s frightened now.  He’s wondering if he has put it off too long?”

Pitilessly she goaded him on.  Then at last she relented and began to persuade him to go to bed.  How white and haggard and queer he looked.  Again a lump rose in her throat.  Soon she was saying quietly: 

“I should think that some day, dear, you’d want to go back to Paris and work.”

He made no answer.

But in the weeks that followed, she dropped this thought again and again into his mind.  Paris, study, work, old dreams—­she played these against his business, against Amy and her friends and the flattery of Fanny Carr, against that odious press agent and the plan for Riverside Drive.

“Has he turned it down?” she inquired of his partner.

“Not yet,” was the answer.  “It’s still in the air.

“I wish this were over,” Ethel thought.  Joe’s face had grown so queer and drawn that sometimes as she looked at him a sickening dread stole into her mind.  “Is he really too old?” she asked herself.

One Saturday night when he came home, with a sudden leap of compassion she saw what a day he had been through.  “But he is through!  Something has happened!” she thought.  And she treated him very tenderly—­both because of the state he was in, and more perhaps because she knew how bad it would be for both of them if he had decided against her.