desk the ghost I thought I
had buried deep, that vague guilty feeling over my own happiness, came
stealing up in me again. And it was so poignant now, that struggle
angrily as I would to plunge again into my work, I found it impossible
to describe the life in those rich gay hotels with the zest and the dash
I needed to make my story a success.

But it had to be a success, for we needed money badly, the expenses of
Joe's sickness were already rolling in. So I did finish it at last and
took it to my successful man, who read it with evident disappointment.
It was not the glory story that I had led him to expect. My magazine
editor said he would use it, but he, too, appeared surprised.

"You weren't up to your usual form," was his comment. "What's the
matter?"

"A sick friend."

I started another story at once, one I had already planned, about a man
who was to build a string of gorgeous opera houses in the leading
American cities. This story, too, went slowly. Joe Kramer's voice kept
breaking in. From time to time as I struggled on I could feel Eleanore
watching me.

"Don't try to hurry it," she said. "We can always borrow from father,
you know--and besides, I'm going to cut our expenses."

She was as good as her word. She dismissed the nurse, and through the
last weeks of delirium and the first of returning consciousness she
placed herself in Joe's borderland as the one whose presence he vaguely
felt pulling him back into comfort and strength.

"No, don't talk," I heard her say to him one evening. "I don't want to
hear you. All I want is to get you well. That's the only thing you and I
have to talk of."

But having so thrown him off his guard, as his mind grew clearer she
began cautiously drawing him out, despite his awakening hostility to
this woman who had made me a success. From my room I heard snatches of
their talk. She surprised J. K. by the intimate bits of knowledge about
him that she had collected both from me and from his own sick ramblings.
She had just enough of his point of view to rouse him from his
indifference, to annoy him by her mistakes and her refusals to
understand. I remember one afternoon when I went in to sit with him, his
staring grimly up at my face and saying:

"Bill, that wife of yours is such a born success she scares me.
Everything she touches, everything she brings me to drink, everything
she does to this bed, is one thundering success. And she won't listen to
anything _but_ succ