Through the thin wall of my workroom I could hear Joe in his delirium. Now he was busily writing letters, now in a harsh excited voice he was talking to a crowd of men, again he was furiously shoveling coal. All this was incoherent, only mutterings most of the time. But when the voice rose suddenly it was so full of a stern pain, so quivering with revolt against life, and it poured out such a torrent of commonplace minute details that showed this was Joe's daily life and the deepest part of his being--that as I listened at my desk the ghost I thought I had buried deep, that vague guilty feeling over my own happiness, came stealing up in me again. And it was so poignant now, that struggle angrily as I would to plunge again into my work, I found it impossible to describe the life in those rich gay hotels with the zest and the dash I needed to make my story a success. But it had to be a success, for we needed money badly, the expenses of Joe's sickness were already rolling in. So I did finish it at last and took it to my successful man, who read it with evident disappointment. It was not the glory story that I had led him to expect. My magazine editor said he would use it, but he, too, appeared surprised. "You weren't up to your usual form," was his comment. "What's the matter?" "A sick friend." I started another story at once, one I had already planned, about a man who was to build a string of gorgeous opera houses in the leading American cities. This story, too, went slowly. Joe Kramer's voice kept breaking in. From time to time as I struggled on I could feel Eleanore watching me. "Don't try to hurry it," she said. "We can always borrow from father, you know--and besides, I'm going to cut our expenses." She was as good as her word. She dismissed the nurse, and through the last weeks of delirium and the first of returning consciousness she placed herself in Joe's borderland as the one whose presence he vaguely felt pulling him back into comfort and strength. "No, don't talk," I heard her say to him one evening. "I don't want to hear you. All I want is to get you well. That's the only thing you and I have to talk of." But having so thrown him off his guard, as his mind grew clearer she began cautiously drawing him out, despite his awakening hostility to this woman who had made me a success. From my room I heard snatches of their talk. She surprised J. K. by the intimate bits of knowledge about him that she had collected both from me and from his own sick ramblings. She had just enough of his point of view to rouse him from his indifference, to annoy him by her mistakes and her refusals to understand. I remember one afternoon when I went in to sit with him, his staring grimly up at my face and saying: