“Twelve thousand a year—in this country!” she cried, and he nodded. “So you see—it gets pretty difficult.” It was a strange thing—this voidness that had been Sarah. When Sarah had been there, their lives were as separate as if they had been two strange boarders in the same boarding house. She had never found anything in common with Sarah; she had never tried to. She had disliked her, and not done her best to conceal this dislike. Now Sarah was gone, and her absence made no ripple in Joy’s life. How could she miss her absence, having never really felt her presence—having even suggested that they ignore each other’s presence? But her going left Joy with a queer feeling of self-hatred. Sarah had been a lonely figure, a drifter on the churning waters of excitement; a drifter with nothing upon which to cling, knowing no more than to keep her head above the rising tide. And Joy had faithfully imitated the performance related of certain people, who, some nineteen hundred years ago, had passed by on the other side. Passing by on the other side was glossed over nowadays as: “It isn’t any of my business.” Everyone did it about everyone. In this new analysis she wondered—-if she had not been passing Jerry by on the other side also. The answer rose automatically to her throat: “It isn’t any of my business.” IX It was after the Christmas holidays, which Joy had worked through with no let-up save Christmas day at home with her father, that Pa announced a change in schedule. “You are working too steadily,” he said. “You never do anything else; you will turn into a machine; then you will no longer be a girl, and the warmth and glory of your appeal will be gone. Like that! Moreover, it takes a fine shade of quality from your voice; I want you to use it as an instrument, of course, but I think too much of how hard you have worked, and how dull your skin and eyes are getting, when I hear you.” “Do you really think I’m losing my quality?” Joy demanded. He laughed. “There—do you see what you just said? That shows you are turning into a little tuning fork, my dear. A _girl_ would have cried: ‘Are my skin and eyes _really_ dull?’ or at least looked in the mirror in front of you.” Before her attitude of unrelaxed question, he grew serious. “No, your quality is not as yet impaired in the slightest; and you are soaring along so swiftly that I cannot believe you have been with me for so few months. But a good teacher can see a fault pending before it takes possession; and as I have so often remarked, I am a good teacher. You need a change.” “Are you going to send me home for a rest?” she asked in swift antagonism. “No. You are going to New York. Take some friends along with you if you wish; stay at the Belmont, where all the _nice_ Bostonians stay when they deign to turn their faces westward; go to the opera; go shopping; in short, have not a rest, but a vacation.”