There was no question here of what was right or wrong, conventional or otherwise. This was love, and this her beloved. Had she not sought him in the highways and the byways? At the close of one afternoon, as she was insisting that she must continue her search for work, now more than ever since neither he nor she had anything, he had said sadly: “Don’t go. We need so little, Ulrica. Don’t. I can’t stand it now.” And she had come back. “No,” she had replied, “I won’t—I can’t—not any more, if you want me.” And she had stayed. And that wondrous, beautiful love-life! The only love-life she had ever known. But just the same she had seen that she must redouble her efforts to make her way, and had. Six hundred dollars she had brought to the city was nearly all gone, and as for Vivian, his allotment was what he could earn, a beggar’s dole. During the days that followed, each bringing them closer, he had confessed more and more of the difficulties that confronted him, how hard it was to sell his wares. And she—it was needful for her to reopen the pages of her past. She had not been happy or prosperous, she told him; fortune might have been hers for the taking but she could not endure those who came with it. Now that she had the misery of her soul’s ache removed she must find something to do. The stage was her great opportunity. And plainly his life was one which had always been and must be based on the grudged dole that life offers to those who love its beauty and lift their eyes. So few, as yet, knew of his work or had been arrested by it. Yet if he persisted, as she felt,—if that wondrous something in his work which had attracted the sensitive and selective did not fail— _The hot, bare redness of the walls of these streets, so flowerless, so bleak, and yet so alive and human!_ But all too well she understood that his life, unless changed by her, would ever be the meagre thing it had been. Beauty was his, but no more,—a beauty of mind and of dreams and of the streets and the night and the sea and the movements of life itself, but of that which was material he had nothing. That was for those whom she had been unable to endure. Only by a deft synthesis of those wondrous faculties which concern beauty was he able to perceive, respond to, translate the things which he saw and felt, and these were not of matter. Rather, they were epitomes, his pictures, of lands and skies and seas and strange valleys of dreams, worlds in miniature. But what transmutations and transferences! She was never weary of the pictures he made. Nor was she ever weary of the picture he made before his easel, tenuous and pale and concerned, his graceful hands at work with the colors he synthetized. The patience, the stability, the indifference to all but that which was his to do! “_Into Bartow Street, Fred._”