"Tell her you think it is to the advantage of the play for me to be there in St. Louis for the opening. It's always good for an interview, and that's advertising." After all I suppose I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't found his wife in a wrapper at four o'clock in the afternoon, when I went out there. If she wouldn't make any better fight for herself, who was I to fight for her? And as Jerry said, for him to be with the play, meant advertising. I talked it over with Griffin that evening, as we sat humped over my tiny stove before the lamps were lighted. Outside we could see the roofs huddling together with the cold, and far beyond, the thin line of the lake beaten white with the wind in a fury of self-tormenting. It made me think of poor little Mrs. Gerald under the lash of her husband's vagaries. "I can't help think that she'd feel it less if she made less fuss about it," I protested. Griffin shook his head. "It's a mercy she can do that; it's when you can't do anything it eats into you." I reflected. "There was a woman I knew who looked like that. O'Farrell's leading lady; she was jealous and there was nothing she could do. She looked gnawed upon!" "Miss Dean, you mean?" "I forgot you said that you knew her." I wanted immensely to know how he came to be mixed up with her. "She was jealous of me, but there was no cause. How well did you know her?" "I ... she ... I was married to her." His face was mottled with embarrassment; it occurred to me that his confusion must have been for his complicity in the fact of their not being married now, but he set me right. "I oughtn't to have told it on her, I suppose. She married me to go on the stage. I was boarding at her mother's and I couldn't have afforded to marry unless she had. You don't know how handsome she was. I knew she couldn't act.... I can't myself, but I know it when I see it. Her father had been an actor of a sort; he had taught her things, and I thought I could pull her along." "She _has_ got on." I let the fact stand for all it was worth. "Yes, she had something almost as good as acting ... she could get hold of people." "She had O'Farrell. Was it on his account you separated?" "Long before that. You see she could handle the managers in her own interest, but she didn't know what to do with me. So I--I got out of her way." Griffin's clothes were too loose for him, and his hair, which wanted trimming, disposed itself in what came perilously near to being ringlets, accentuating the effect of his having been shrivelled, and shrunk within the mark of his capacity. There was a certain shame about him as he made this admission, that made me feel that though to leave his wife free to seek her own sort of success had been a generous thing to do, it was all he could do; his moral nature had suffered an incurable strain. "Griff, did they tell you when you were young, that love was all bound up with what you should do in the world and what you could get for it?"