At times she grew so impatient to get Joe into this other world. But she had to be very careful. Repeatedly she warned herself that Dwight, for all his Paris past and his present friendliness, was very fast becoming a New Yorker like the rest: making his way and climbing his climb, and wanting no climbers who had to be carried. "Ethel Lanier, the first thing you know you'll be dropped like a hot potato," she thought. "There's nothing unselfish about this man. Don't make him feel he has you on his hands." And she would grow studiously abstract and detached in her talk about the town. But it kept cropping up in spite of her, this warm eagerness to "really live." "It's funny," she said to Dwight one day. "I had thought of music and all that I wanted as being so different from Joe's work. But now in this city that you seem to know, I find that what I've wanted most is just what he ought to want in his work! The two go together!" "Exactly!" "The city Joe once lived in." She frowned. "There are so many cities in New York. But I don't want to try to get into his, until I can do it through Joe himself. People will have to want me because I'm the wife of Joe Lanier." "I think they'll want you more than that." His tone was most reassuring. "But I like the way you are going about it. It's so delightfully novel, you see--conspiring to make your husband find his friends all by himself--so that when he has found them he'll come to you with a beaming smile and say, 'Woman, I bring you wealth and fame and friends in abundance. Take them, love, and bless me--for I have done all this for you.'" Ethel smiled. "I don't like you to joke about it," she said. "Very well," he agreed, "let's get back to the serious work of his resurrection. You asked me to recruit other brisk diggers, and I've hunted about quite a bit. There's that chap Crothers and his wife, but so far they're the best I can do--and the Crothers pair seem rather blind. They can't see the old Joe for the new." "You mean they think he's hopeless," Ethel scornfully put in. "Oh, we'll make them open their eyes in time. I drop in on them every now and then. I had Crothers to the club last week, and let him hear some of the gossip about the emerging Joe Lanier."