I don't mean that Jerry wasn't fond of his wife in a way, and faithful to her, in so far as she didn't interfere with his male prerogative of being played upon by other women, but I do not think he had ever an inkling that the vortex of anger and despair which she forced him to share with her, in lieu of the passion which she couldn't any more excite, was of the same stripe as his need of the high, inflated mood that Miss Filette provided for him with her little bag of tricks. For from the first Jerry seized on me, poured himself out, despoiled himself of all the hopes, conjectures, half-guesses of his career, and that without in the least discovering that I was in need of much the same sort of relief myself. After his wife had taken the children to the country--though she used even then to come down on him suddenly with both of them and break up his work for days, or just when it was running smoothly, wire to him to rush up to Lake View and allay the horrors of her too active imagination--often evenings after the day's work, he would take me to dine at queer little French or Italian restaurants which were supposed to be preferred on account of the "atmosphere" rather than their cheapness, and uncoil for me there all the intricate turnings of his work upon itself, and the rich shapes and colours it took, played upon by the slanting eyes and carmine smile of Miss Filette. He would sit opposite me with a cigarette and a glass of "Dago red," his black, shining hair, which he wore too long, slanting above his forehead like a boding wing, uncramping his soul; and though I liked him as a friend, and as a playwright thought him immensely worth while, I was divided between exasperation at his tacit exclusion of me from the world of excited powers in which any stimulation of his maleness threw him, and fear that in missing his capacity for quick, shallow passions, I had missed the one indispensable thing for my art. "It is the chance of a lifetime," Jerry would be reassuring me, "to delineate a character that will be so intimate an expression of the one who is to play it ... it's really extraordinary that she should have been named Fancy ... it's symbolic." "Oh, if you imagine she is really in the least like the _Mrs. Brandis_ you are creating ... besides, I happen to know her name is Powers, Amanda Powers." He caught at this delightedly. "Ah, she's a poet, a poet! Such self-knowledge! To think of her knowing what would suit her so exactly!"