“Takes grit to live sometimes, doesn’t it, Bill? Just grit!” he said. Little more was spoken on that ensuing two miles before the train drew alongside the Paris depot platform. IV It takes grit to live sometimes—just grit! Milly naturally was the more grief-stricken of the two in the hectic days which followed. But it was Mrs. Anna Forge who shed the most tears and acted generally as though the bottom had dropped from the universe. She gave up her job in the millinery store—just why it was necessary to give up her job under the circumstances is difficult to explain, but she did—and moved to Nathan’s house, bag and baggage, “to help.” That her help had not been solicited was immaterial. That there was nothing especially to “help” was likewise passed over. She had not visited Nathan’s home a dozen times since his marriage, not being able to “get along” with Nathan’s wife. And the child had once blandly commented that its grandmother “had starin’, ugly eyes,” which had prejudiced her from intimacy with Nat’s youngster and convinced her that Nathan’s wife and family were somehow in league against her and had put the child up to it. But now that the forked tines of death had struck near home, and tears being right in her line, she insisted on a bed in the front room, and no paid Semitic mourner ever gave greater satisfaction for services rendered than Mrs. Forge before that ordeal was ended. Incredible to relate, Nathan’s loss called up all her own losses a hundredfold and the distressing period was aggravated by the mother’s worry because the oil-stock salesman had stopped answering her letters as to just when she was to get her dividends of three thousand per cent., and the cold, stark presentiment began to dawn on the woman that perhaps her investment was in jeopardy. It being a time of general sorrow, her own worries and troubles were right in line and she bunched them together. Nathan heard about them for the three-hundredth time; what the oil-stock salesman had said to her, and what she had said to the oil-stock salesman, and what he had promised and what she had expected, and what Johnathan had said to her apropos of her value as a wife during twenty-five years of incompatibility, and what she had retorted to Johnathan,—till Milly exploded and declared if she said another word, she, Milly, would shriek; which Mrs. Forge did and which Milly did, and Nathan had to act as peacemaker and keep all hands as reasonably pleasant as possible until after the services. I slept with Nathan the night before the funeral. Milly had sent for her own mother and was sleeping with her, the wife characteristically preferring the solace and companionship of her mother to her husband, and my presence being proffered to mitigate my friend’s load as much as I could. And Mrs. Forge wept for her lost grandchild and oil-stock—or oil-stock and grandchild—and would not be comforted.