n
thinking as she came home in the stage how, as with a magic wand, she
might gild Hedger's future, float him out of his dark hole on a tide of
prosperity, see his name in the papers and his pictures in the windows on
Fifth Avenue.

Hedger mechanically snapped the midsummer leash on Caesar's collar and
they ran downstairs and hurried through Sullivan Street off toward the
river. He wanted to be among rough, honest people, to get down where the
big drays bumped over stone paving blocks and the men wore corduroy
trowsers and kept their shirts open at the neck. He stopped for a drink
in one of the sagging bar-rooms on the water front. He had never in his
life been so deeply wounded; he did not know he could be so hurt. He had
told this girl all his secrets. On the roof, in these warm, heavy summer
nights, with her hands locked in his, he had been able to explain all his
misty ideas about an unborn art the world was waiting for; had been able
to explain them better than he had ever done to himself. And she had
looked away to the chattels of this uptown studio and coveted them for
him! To her he was only an unsuccessful Burton Ives.

Then why, as he had put it to her, did she take up with him? Young,
beautiful, talented as she was, why had she wasted herself on a scrub?
Pity? Hardly; she wasn't sentimental. There was no explaining her. But in
this passion that had seemed so fearless and so fated to be, his own
position now looked to him ridiculous; a poor dauber without money or
fame,--it was her caprice to load him with favours. Hedger ground his
teeth so loud that his dog, trotting beside him, heard him and looked up.

While they were having supper at the oyster-man's, he planned his escape.
Whenever he saw her again, everything he had told her, that he should
never have told any one, would come back to him; ideas he had never
whispered even to the painter whom he worshipped and had gone all the way
to France to see. To her they must seem his apology for not having horses
and a valet, or merely the puerile boastfulness of a weak man. Yet if she
slipped the bolt tonight and came through the doors and said, "Oh, weak
man, I belong to you!" what could he do? That was the danger. He would
catch the train out to Long Beach tonight, and tomorrow he would go on to
the north end of Long Island, where an old friend of his had a summer
studio among the sand dunes. He would stay until things came right in his
mind. And she could fi