"And if you love him as I love Joe," she added almost in a whisper, "you find it so easy that often you forget what it is you're trying to do, what you're really doing it for. You're just happy and you shut your eyes. But then you wake up and use it all--everything--to drive him on. You can do that while you are still young and have what he wants--the looks, I mean--and can make him see that any number of other men would be glad to step into his shoes. But you give them only just enough to keep your husband from feeling too safe. You hold them off, you make him feel that he's everything to you if he'll work and give you what you ought to have! And unless you're a fool you don't listen to this talk of women's rights and women doing the work of men. You keep on your own ground and play the game. And you keep making him get what you need--before it's too late!" All at once she gave a sharp little laugh. "It's a kind of a race, you see," she said. The night after this talk, Ethel lay in her bed, and tried to remember and think it out. How new and queer and puzzling. So many vistas she had dreamed of had been closed on every hand. "What's the matter with me?" The matter was that her old ideals and standards were being torn up by the roots, roots that went deep down into the soil of life in the town in Ohio. But Ethel did not think of that. She scowled and sighed. "Well, this is real! I was dreaming! And after all, this is much the same, but different in the way you get it. This is New York. One thing is sure," she added. "Amy needs every dollar Joe can make--and she must not have me on her hands. I've got to find what I really want--a job or a man--and be quick about it!" It threw a tinge of uneasiness into those breathless shopping tours. And it changed her attitude toward Joe. He had not counted for much at first; he had been a mere man of business; and business men had had little place in her dreams of friends in the city. But watching him now she changed her mind. Joe Lanier was what is called "a speculative builder." He was an architect, building contractor and real estate gambler, all in one. He put up apartment buildings "on spec," buildings of the cheaper sort, most of them up in the Bronx, and sold them at a profit--or a loss, as the case might be. He dealt in the rapidly shifting values of neighbourhoods in the changing town. "The gamble in it is the fun," he remarked to Ethel one evening. Joe was just the kind of a man, as Amy had told her sister, to make a big sudden success of his work. Unfortunately he was tied to a partner, Nourse by name, who held him back. This man Amy keenly disliked. She said that Nourse was a perfect grind, a heavy tiresome creature who thought business was everything in the world.