saw he was ready to stay home. She herself felt tired and relaxed; and
it was good to sit at home on these December evenings and feel that both
had partly emerged from the sea of doubts in which they had been
plunged. He had come out of it, she soon learned, with an image of his
wife that even Ethel vaguely felt was swiftly becoming so ideal as to
have little or no resemblance to the woman who had died. But eagerly
she helped him in this building of Amy's memory. She dwelt upon Amy's
appealing side, her lovable moods, her beauty and dash, her unerring
instinct for pretty things, her unselfishness, her anxious planning for
Ethel's good.

And all this fitted in so well with the picture Joe was making of the
wife who had been so true to him, who had never had a thought or a wish
for anything but his career. How cheerfully she had given up all sorts
of pleasures, trips abroad, a house in the country, summer vacations.
Year after year she had spent the hot months almost wholly in town
because he could not afford to leave, although she herself had had many
chances to go to friends in the mountains or up along the seashore.
Instead she had stayed with him in town; and in the evenings always she
had been waiting, good-humoured and gay, ready to stay home or go out;
with never a word of complaint for the delay of his prosperity, but only
encouragement and praise.

At times, as Joe talked on and on, in this mood of hungry wistful love
and humility and self-reproach, Ethel would bring herself back with a
jerk to the Amy she had known; but again she would feel herself borne
along upon the tide of his belief, and she was glad that it was so. So
the picture grew. Nor was it only when they talked. For often in long
silences, when she thought he was reading his paper, she would glance up
from her book and find him staring into the past. And again at the