His Second Wife | Page 9

husband stick to you! There
are things about that you will learn soon enough. It comes so naturally,
once you are in it--married, I mean. And that's your hold.
"And if you love him as I love Joe," she added almost in a whisper,
"you find it so easy that often you forget what it is you're trying to do,
what you're really doing it for. You're just happy and you shut your
eyes. But then you wake up and use it all--everything--to drive him on.

You can do that while you are still young and have what he wants--the
looks, I mean--and can make him see that any number of other men
would be glad to step into his shoes. But you give them only just
enough to keep your husband from feeling too safe. You hold them off,
you make him feel that he's everything to you if he'll work and give
you what you ought to have! And unless you're a fool you don't listen
to this talk of women's rights and women doing the work of men. You
keep on your own ground and play the game. And you keep making
him get what you need--before it's too late!" All at once she gave a
sharp little laugh. "It's a kind of a race, you see," she said.
The night after this talk, Ethel lay in her bed, and tried to remember and
think it out. How new and queer and puzzling. So many vistas she had
dreamed of had been closed on every hand.
"What's the matter with me?"
The matter was that her old ideals and standards were being torn up by
the roots, roots that went deep down into the soil of life in the town in
Ohio. But Ethel did not think of that. She scowled and sighed.
"Well, this is real! I was dreaming! And after all, this is much the same,
but different in the way you get it. This is New York. One thing is
sure," she added. "Amy needs every dollar Joe can make--and she must
not have me on her hands. I've got to find what I really want--a job or a
man--and be quick about it!"
It threw a tinge of uneasiness into those breathless shopping tours. And
it changed her attitude toward Joe. He had not counted for much at first;
he had been a mere man of business; and business men had had little
place in her dreams of friends in the city. But watching him now she
changed her mind.
Joe Lanier was what is called "a speculative builder." He was an
architect, building contractor and real estate gambler, all in one. He put
up apartment buildings "on spec," buildings of the cheaper sort, most of
them up in the Bronx, and sold them at a profit--or a loss, as the case
might be. He dealt in the rapidly shifting values of neighbourhoods in

the changing town. "The gamble in it is the fun," he remarked to Ethel
one evening. Joe was just the kind of a man, as Amy had told her sister,
to make a big sudden success of his work. Unfortunately he was tied to
a partner, Nourse by name, who held him back. This man Amy keenly
disliked. She said that Nourse was a perfect grind, a heavy tiresome
creature who thought business was everything in the world.
"Sometimes I really believe he forgets it's for making money," Amy
declared. "He's as anxious about it as an old hen, and he wants it steady
as a cow. He detests me, as I do him. He has stopped coming here,
thank heaven. And the time is not so far away when I'll make Joe see
that he's got to lose his partner."
Joe's image gained steadily in importance to Ethel's awakening eyes. Of
his force as a man, all that she saw made her more and more certain
that Amy was right. Joe was the kind who was bound to succeed. He
not only worked hard, his work was a passion. At night and on Sunday
mornings he could sit for hours absorbed in the tiresome pages of real
estate news in his paper. He went out for strolls in the evenings; one
night he asked Ethel to come along; and his talk to her about buildings,
the growth of the city by leaps and bounds, now in this direction, now
in that, caught her imagination at once. Joe felt the town as a living
thing, as she had felt it that first night. Different? Yes, this was business.
But even business, to her surprise, as Joe saw and felt it, had a strange
thrilling romance of its own.
And she soon noticed something else that drew her to Joe. Almost
every