ther is down there," Jason Lee said. "Sun baths and all that.
You said there was another woman, Oliver."

"Yes." Quite simply and honestly he told him about Sandwich Jane. "She's
made me see things."

"What things?"

"Well, she thinks I've got it in me to get anywhere. She insists that if
I'd put my heart into it I might be--President."

One saw their likeness to each other in their twinkling eyes!

"She says that men follow me; and they do. I've found that out since I
went to Tinkersfield. She wants me to go into politics--there's a gang
down there that rules the town--rotten crowd. It would be some fight if
I did."

His father was interested at once. "It was what I wanted--when I was
young--politics--clean politics, with a chance at statesmanship. Yes, I
wanted it. But your mother wanted--money."

"Money hasn't any meaning to me now, dad. If I slaved until I dropped I
couldn't make fifteen hundred a week."

"Does--your wife make that now?"

"Yes. She's making it and spending it, I fancy."

Silence. Then: "What of this--other woman. What are you going to do
about her?"

O-liver leaned forward, speaking earnestly. "I love her. But I'm not
free. It's all a muddle."

"Does she know you're married?"

"No. I've got to tell her. But I'll lose her if I do. Her comradeship, I
mean. And I don't want to give it up."

"There is of course a solution."

"What solution?"

"Divorce."

"It wouldn't be a solution for Jane. She's not that kind. Marriage with
her means till death parts. I'll have to lose her. But it hurts."

VII

It was when Jane rented an empty room fronting on the arcade and set up
a sandwich shop that Tillotson saw how serious the thing was going to
be.

He had had all the restaurant and hotel trade. Men coming up in motors
or on horseback, dusty and tired, had eaten and drunk at his squalid
tables, swearing at the food but unable to get anything better. And now
here was a woman who covered her counters with snowy oilcloth--who had
shining urns of coffees, delectable pots of baked beans, who put up in
neat boxes lunches that made men rush back for more and more and
more--and whose sandwiches were the talk of the coast!

It had to be stopped.

The only way to stop it was to make it uncomfortable for Jane. There
were many ways in which the thing could be done--by small and subtle
persecutions, by insinuations, by words bandied from one man's evil
mouth to another. Tillotson had done