"He lost his grip, somehow," said Avery, "and went from one disaster into another. First he lost his place, and the little salary they had to live on was stopped. It was no fault of his. It had been in due course of a business change in the firm he worked for. He got another, but not so good a situation, but the little debts that had run up while he was idle were a constant drag on him. He never seemed able to catch up. Then his wife's health failed. She needed a change of climate, rare and delicate food, a quiet mind relieved of anxiety, but he could not give her these. His own nerves gave way under the strain, and at last sickness overtook him, and he had to appeal to me for a loan." It was the letter which his friend had written when in that desperate frame of mind, which Avery read to Gertrude the day they had discussed the novel together. It was a strange, desperate letter, and it had greatly stirred Gertrude. One passage in it had rather shocked her. It was this: "When a fellow is young, and knows little enough of life to accept the fictions of fiction as guides, he talks or thinks about it as 'love in a cottage.' After he has tried it a while, and suffered in heart and soul _because_ of his love of those whom he must see day after day handicapped in mind and wrecked in body for the need of larger means, he begins to speak of it mournfully as 'poverty with love' But when that awful day comes, when sickness or misfortune develops before his helpless gaze all the horrors of dependence and agony of mind that the future outlook shows him, then it is that the fitting description comes, and he feels like painting above the door he dreads to enter--'hell at home.' Without the love there would be no home; without the poverty no hell. Neither lightens the burdens of the other. Each multiplies all that is terrible in both." Gertrude had listened to the letter with a sad heart. When she did not speak, Avery felt that he should modify some of its terms if he would be fair to his absent acquaintance. "Of course he would have worded it a little differently if he had known that any one else would read it. He was desperate. He had gone through such a succession of disasters. If anything was going to fall it seemed as if he was sure to be under it, so I don't much wonder at his language after--" "I don't wonder at it at all," said Gertrude, looking steadily into the fire. "What seems wonderful, is the facts which his words portray. I can see that they are facts; but what I cannot see is--is--" "How he could express them so raspingly--so--?" began Avery, but she turned to him quite frankly surprised. "Oh, no! Not that. But how can it be right that it should be so? And if it is not right, why do not you men who have the power, do something to straighten things out? Is this sort of suffering absolutely _necessary_ in the world?"