Thurley trilled a scale or so. She was thinking of a black-haired lad who had said many’s the time, “Hang your voice, Thurley! It’s you I love—just you!” Pink linen and old-fashioned parlor organs did have compensations. “When you come back, we’ll plan about our real home,” Miss Clergy added. “My lawyers try to impress on me what a neglectful person I’ve been. They want me to mend my ways and spend my money—not be a sort of Hetty Green always travelling about with a little satchel of securities!” Miss Clergy’s sense of humor was reviving with the rest. “Our real home—besides the Fincherie? You’ll never give that up?” Miss Clergy frowned. “Not the Fincherie! I mean here in New York. We can’t go on living in a hotel. It is too common, too parvenu. I want the right sort of home for you, the sort that your ability will deserve.” Thurley was in the doorway. “I beg you will do nothing of the sort,” she said. “You have loaded me now with the treasures of Arabia. I beg you will not! I want to earn things myself—as I did at the Corners—you must let me. Being supported takes something out of me, I don’t know what,” she clasped her hands in her rapt fashion. “I’d rather live in a tiny room, or a box-car, you know, and have very skimpy meals and old-style clothes and study hard and forget the meals and clothes and then earn the beautiful, lovely things. That would make me feel right, ’way inside.” Miss Clergy’s withered face lost some of its haunted expression. “Well, my dear, you shall wait then and earn your home, but I am afraid that, if it is quite your own home, you will not want to share it with a funny old per—” At which Thurley flew across the room and put her fresh cheek against the faded one to promise with the enthusiasm of untried youth that the home she should earn would be but half her home, for the other half would belong to a certain dear person. Whirling towards the studio, Thurley drew Betsey Pilrig’s letter from her bag. It was the second letter she had had from the Corners, for Betsey Pilrig undertook writing a letter with the same solemn preparation that most people give to making a will. It required several days of deciding “what to say to her” and a battle against natural inertia before she could sit at the red-covered dining-table and force her toil-worn fingers to write in cramped characters unreal-sounding phrases. Besides, Betsey Pilrig had always sealed letters with the firm conviction that maybe they would never get there anyway, letters seemed such queer things to go flying about the country. Not that Betsey had not thought of Thurley every hour in the day, standing in the doorway of her house and of the Fincherie to picture again the blue-eyed young goddess dancing imperiously up the walk or sitting under gnarled apple trees to shell peas or peel potatoes, singing in glorious tones as she did so.