e, Mr.
Curtis," Lily had said, "and eggs are going up, awful!" She had never
gone back to the familiarity of those days when she called him "Curt."
That he, dull and preoccupied, still called her Lily gave her, somehow,
such a respectful consciousness of his superiority that she had
hesitated to speak of anything so intimate as eggs... "Yes, I must give
her something extra," Maurice thought, remembering the "cost" of living.
"Talk about paying the piper! I bet _I'm_ paying him, all right!"

He was to meet Mrs. Houghton at seven-thirty that night, and it occurred
to him that if he told Eleanor he had some extra work to do at his desk
he could wedge this call in between office hours and the time when he
must go to the station--("and they call me 'G. Washington'!") He felt no
special cautiousness in going out to Maple Street; the few people he
knew in Mercer did not frequent this locality, and if any of them
should chance to see him--a most remote possibility!--why, was he not in
the real-estate business, and constantly looking at houses? On this
particular afternoon, jolting along in the trolley car, he grimly amused
himself with the thought of what he would do if, say, Eleanor herself
should see him turning that infernally shrill bell on Lily's door. It
was a wild flight of imagination, for Eleanor never would see him--never
could see him! Eleanor, who only went to Medfield when their wedding
anniversary came round, and she dragged him out to sit by the river and
sentimentalize! He thought of the loveliness of that past June--and the
contrasting and ironic ugliness of the present September.... Now, the
little secret house in the purlieus of Mercer's smoke and grime; then,
the river, and the rippling tides of grass and clover, and the blue
sky--and that ass, lying at the feet of a woman old enough to be his
mother!

He laughed as he swung off the car--then frowned; for he saw that to
reach Lily's door he would have to pass a baby carriage standing just
inside the gate. He didn't glance into the carriage at the roly-poly
youngster. He never, on the rare occasions when he went to see Lily,
looked at his child if he could avoid doing so--and she never asked him
to. Once, annoyed at Jacky's shrill noisiness, he had protested,
frowning: "Can't you keep it quiet? It needs a spanking!" After that
indifferent criticism ("For _I_ don't care how she brings it up!") Lily
had not wanted him to see her baby. She could not have said j