I saw more than a little of Jerry McDermott during the spring and summer that I stayed in Chicago, haunting managers' offices in my winter's suit and a fixed determination not to let any of them suspect that I knew I couldn't, for the moment, act at all. Where the gift had gone I did not know, nor when, in some desperate encounter with the chance of an engagement, I attempted to draw about me the tattered remnants of my old facility, had I any notion what would bring it back again. Effie wrote me to come home for the hot weather, but though I regretted afterward not having done so I could not make up my mind to leave Chicago. It seemed to me then that the deadly quality of Taylorville lay waiting like a trap, which in my present benumbed condition might close on me if I put myself in the way of it. I thought that if I got out of reach of the flare of light from the theatre doors, of the smell of back scenes and the florid grip of the posters, that I should never in this world win back to them. A summer in Taylorville would have saved me money, would have rested and perhaps restored the balance of my powers, but the inward monitor of which I was the mere shell and surface, clutched upon the city with the grip of desperation. I hung upon whatever slight attachments to the theatre my circumstances afforded, like the drowned upon a rope, and waited for the resuscitating touch. Somewhere beyond me I was aware of succour; not knowing from whence it should come, I grasped at everything within reach and was buffeted and torn about in the eddy of reverses. What more even than his need of me, drove me back on Gerald McDermott, was the certainty that he was deriving from Fancy Filette the quality I missed. She was playing in one of the cheaper theatres in one of those entertainments that men are supposed to resort to when their families are out of town, and I had a moment's feeling that he exposed his sex to ridicule by the avidity with which he surrendered himself to her perfectly obvious methods. Until he sent his family north to one of the lake resorts for the hot weather, I found myself involved in certain obligations of visiting at his house, where I saw that his wife created for him by her incompetence much the same sort of background that my bereaved and purse-pinched condition made for me, and watched with alternate sympathy and resentment his flight from it to the effective self-complacency which Miss Filette induced in him.