"Does she know--Miss Filette, I mean--about the child." "Not unless Jerry has told her--which he'd hardly do." Sarah laughed a little, and that was not usual with her; she had very little humour. "Fancy is so up in the air about the success of the play, she thinks she inspired it. I imagine they'd feel it an indelicacy of Mrs. McDermott to have intruded her condition on their relation. Of course it is understood that there's nothing really wrong about it...." "It is wrong if his wife is made unhappy by it." I hadn't Sarah's reason for being lenient. "Somebody ought to speak to Jerry." "You might--he would listen to you. It is just because there is so little in it that it is so hard to deal with." I suppose I took to interfering in the McDermott's affairs because I had so little of my own to interest me. Besides, I was fond of Jerry and didn't see how he was to be helped by getting his family into a muddle. "But after all," Sarah reminded me, "it is his own wife and his own inspiration." It wasn't in me to tell her, even if I had understood it myself at the time, that the secret of my resentment was that it should be so accepted on all sides that one must choose between them. I wanted, oh, I immensely wanted, what Jerry was getting out of his relation to Miss Filette, but I wanted it free of the implication that my abandonment of my husband to the village dressmaker put me in anything like the same case. "The real trouble with you," Jerry told me, "is that you are trying to live in Chicago and Taylorville at the same time." Not being able to make any headway with him, I went to call on Miss Filette. I wasn't on terms with her that would admit of an assault on her confidence, I didn't know her well enough to call on her in any case, but I wasn't to be thwarted of good intention by anything so small as a breech of manners in doing it. It wasn't so much the offense of my undertaking it that counted, I found, as Miss Filette's determination not to hear anything that would ruffle the surface of her complacency. I had to drop plumb into my revelation out of the opportunity she made for me in the question, as to whether the play would or would not go on the road before Christmas. "I should hope so," I dropped squarely on her; "Jerry's wife needs him. There's a child coming in April." "Yes," said Miss Filette; she was giving me tea and she poised the second lump over my cup with an inquiring eyebrow. "Have you seen what we have done with the second act lately?" "Anyway," I said to myself as I went, "she knows. She can't skid over the facts as she has my telling her." But it was the certainty that, knowing, she kept right on with Jerry, that drove me back on Pauline and Henry Mills. I fled to them to be saved from what, in the only other society I had access to, fretted all my finer instincts; to be ricocheted by them again on to that reef of moral squalour upon which the artist and woman in me were riven asunder.